Earthquakes and infernal imagery. On the reception of a Homeric passage in Latin epic and Lucretius

Autor: Leonardo Galli
Jazyk: English<br />Italian
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Griseldaonline, Vol 19, Iss 1, Pp 1-16 (2020)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1721-4777
DOI: 10.6092/issn.1721-4777/10703
Popis: In the ancient world, the chasm caused by earthquakes was considered as a passage between the world of the dead and that of the living. The paper aims to investigate this dystopian imagery in Latin poetry: the Nachleben of a famous Iliadic passage will be explored firstly in Latin epic (Virgil, Ovid, Silius Italicus and Statius) and then in a different and, in a sense, unexpected work, the didactic poem of Lucretius. In this respect, particular attention will be given to how Latin poets re-elaborate this imagery: in fact, they do not limit themselves to work over Homer’s text, but they also make reference to intermediary texts, according to a literary technique which has been defined as «window reference».
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals