AEVUM ANTIQUUM - 2018 - 18

The irregular character of Ovid’s battle scenes in the Metamorphoses is mirrored by their unconventional, idiosyncratic narrative technique, tracing back to their remote antiquity. In their attempt to ‘reconstruct’ ancient pre-homeric battles – thus providing an actual ‘ex post’ background to Iliad and Aeneid – the Flavian epicists capitalize on Ovid’s lesson, in that they actually give Ovidian audacious innovations a license of epic ‘regularity’. In order to sketch this phenomenon, the following article take into account a specific case-study, such as the influence of Ovid’s centauromachy (Metamorphoses Book XII) on Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica.

Starting from the mention of Naso in Silvae 1, 2, some Ovidian effects in Statius’ writing are analysed, with examples from the Thebaid and the Silvae; attention is given to textual and linguistic markers of allusion, irony, and self-reflexivity.

Martial connects from many points of view to Ovid’s poetry. The first part of this paper takes into consideration the representation of city crowd and of the ceremony of triumph in the two authors. The second part analyzes the presence of the exile elegy especially in the twelfth book of epigrams. The paper remarks the importance of reading the intertextuality with Ovid not as an isolated dialogue but in interaction with other texts, first of all with Horace’s sermo.

This article seeks to establish a theoretical basis for the study of the reception of Ovidian love elegy in Apuleius, by reviewing the history of the early reception of Augustan elegy and the studies on that history and specifically the reception of Ovid’s elegy in Roman novels, and develops upon that basis an intertextual connection between Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Book 9, and an erotic episode from Ovid’s Fasti, Book 2.

Ovid the poet of irregular love, is also the poet who celebrates married love. His wife appears in both the Amores and the exile poetry, and the Metamorphoses contains a number of major episodes on the theme of marriage and conjugal love. In this paper I first examine the Ovidian stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Ceyx and Alcyone, with contrastive reference to the theme of marriage in Virgil. I then turn to a number of examples of the post-antique reception of Ovidian stories and images of conjugal love: Chaucer’s rewriting of Ceyx and Alcyone in The Book of the Duchess; the use of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as an image for marital union in Edmund Spenser and in other Renaissance texts and images; Milton’s use of Ovidian episodes of married love in Paradise Lost. I end with the panegyrical equation, in Ovid’s poetry and in Rubens’ Life of Maria de’ Medici, of divine marriages in heaven with the earthly marriages of rulers.

The study aims to show the fertility of the Ovidian representation of the phenomena of nature through the study of poetic works of the Renaissance. Ovid develops a specific poetics to represent the generative process in all its extension, combining the primordial elements and the language of the myth. In the Quattrocento, the Humanist Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503) is inspired by this poetic exploration of ‘physical’ theories to portray a world responding to a generative logic. He associates, as his illustrious model, the power primordial elements, the force of the passions and the marvellous, according to a new causality whose poetic language becomes the privileged revelator.

This paper analyzes the intertextuality between the competition among the Muses over the aetiology of April in the Sacri Fasti of the Renaissance Latin poet Ambrogio Novidio Fracco and on the one hand Ovid’s similar scene at the start of Book 5 of his Fasti and on the other the poet’s spirited defense of Venus against an alternative aition in Fasti 4. Fracco’s contaminatio of the two Ovidian episodes at the same time engages theologically with the ancient pagan exemplar of calendrical poetry. Unlike Ovid’s discordant Muses, those of Fracco disagree with one another only temporarily, until one of them persuades her sisters to embrace a Christian world-view.

In silv. I 3, in order to describe the villa of Manilius Vopiscus at Tibur, Statius makes use of a particular compositional technique, typical of the Silvae, by pressing to the fore and developing certain themes and recurrent motifs through repetitions with variations. A preeminent function of these repetitions is to evoke Horatian memories that become ever clearer as the poem progresses. Within this interpretive frame, various exegetic and textual problems of the poem are discussed (in particular ll. 23, 42, 103, 104 and 109).

This paper analyses Lucian’s DMar. 14, on Perseus and Andromeda, under a double perspective: intertextual and intervisual. On the one hand, it clarifies Lucian’s debts towards Euripides’ Andromeda – apparently, its main literary model. On the other hand, also through comparison with a passage from De domo (22-23), it shows how Lucian, in constructing his (as usually ironic and critical) version of the story, appeals to the visual memory of his audience almost in the same way in which he urges their literary memory, according to a technique often exploited by the rhetor. The analysis is concluded by some remarks on DMar. 12, the ‘prequel’ of this dialogue (it concerns Danae, abandoned at sea by her father with infant Perseus), in order to show that it is analogously influenced by the theatrical tradition and that it also has strong visual connotations.

At Statius, silv. IV 7, 1 the paradosis sociata has long been suspected of being corrupt: the most recent editors print the humanistic conjecture spatiata. This note aims at defending the MSS reading as an example of those ‘flights’ which are at the centre of Pindarus’ poetry, the Greek model explicitly invoked by Statius.

Lucan’s poem has long been accused of an excessive influence of the rhetorical and declamatory practice. Even if this view cannot be upheld anymore, the inner consistency of poetry and rhetoric in the Bellum Civile has hitherto been asserted more than demonstrated. This paper tries to detect, by a thorough analysis of the text, how this relationship works in a primary pivot of the narrative, i.e. immediately after the battle of Pharsalus, whose aftermath is described in the eighth book of the poem.

This paper attempts to fill the lacuna at POxy. 2429 fr. 1 (a) col. i, 9 s. = Epich. fr. 98, 9 s. (Odysseus automolos).

This article aims to develop some considerations about the role of natura and ars in Stat. silv. II 5 through the analysis of some gladiatorial traits of the leo mansuetus.