Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper aims to define the dialectic between “finished” and “unfinished” in the works of Virgil and Horace.
A final and shorter section will be devoted to Ovid. The dialectic finished/unfinished will be analysed within
the framework of three variously interrelated topics: its relationship to literary forms and models (especially
from Hellenistic poetry); the author’s self-representation and his projection of “immortality”; the context of
receptions among readers and the relationship with political power (first and foremost, with Augustus).

The aim of this paper is to offer a study on L. Varius Rufus and his works (especially the poem De morte), seen mainly in their strict relation with some fundamental authors and texts of Augustan poetry: Virgil’s Bucolics, Georgics, and Aeneid; Horace’s Sermones and Carmina; Propertius 2.34 (new arguments are also proposed in favour of the identification Lynceus = Varius in this elegy). Varius’s reinterpretation, especially in Virgil, has been often considered a typical example of ‘arte allusiva’ (virtually from Macrobius to G. Pasquali).

Horace in ep. 1.4 opposes a sad, somehow Stoic Tibullus to himself as a happy, fat Epicurean. Seneca in ep. 60 blames a number of tenets of Epicureanism in its trivial acception (e.g. the love for easy life and good food), quoting a phrase from Sallust, and then in ep. 61 proposes Stoic way of life as the right life.