L'encomio e l'epicedio: un modello strutturale dall'elegia ellenistica a quella latina

The Encomium and the Epicede. A Structural Model from the Hellenistic to the Latin Elegy · The poem 68 of Catullus’ liber, whose unity constitutes an unresolved vexata quaestio for modern criticism, is the starting point of the present work and also its point of arrival. The hypothesis put forward here is that it was read as a single elegiac poem through the fictitious juxtaposition of two Catullan poems that were originally autonomous, 68a and 68b, and that this occurred in the course of the events that Catullus’ poetry and his liber underwent after the poet’s lifetime: the intention of the juxtaposition was to ‘unify’ in a single composition a poem of epicedic structure (68a) and one of encomiastic structure (68b) on the basis of certain elements of thematic affinity that existed between them. The analysis then shifts to a lost poem from the Hellenistic elegiac tradition, the Arete by Parthenius of Nicaea, which, according to the sources, had exactly this kind of structure: it was an epicede of his deceased wife that was at the same time an encomium. This poem, looking in structure and content to earlier models of the Hellenistic elegiac tradition, in particular to the Lyde of Antimachus of Colophon, exercised its influence on the emerging tradition of Latin elegy in the second half of the 1st century BC, especially in the milieu of the neoterical poets. Since this was also an environment in which Catullus’s poetry circulated during the poet’s lifetime and after his death, the experiment of fictitiously joining the two different poems, 68a and 68b, was probably carried out there in imitation of the Greek model.