In chapter 41 of Petronius’ Satyricon, a boar is served in a hat (pilleatus) during Trimalchio’s feast, which puzzles the protagonist Encolpius. The interpretation of the passage considered in the article (Petron. Sat. 41. 3) involves a number of difficulties, which all commentators note. Firstly, the reader needs to decide whether the case of summa cena is accusative or nominative. The second difficulty has to do with the meaning of the adjective summus. The third question concerns the meaning of the verb vindicasset. And the last and most crucial question deals with the fact that both cena and aper can function as the subject of the verb vindicasset. The author of the article looks into the opinions of various scholars and offers several arguments for the manuscript reading, which enables us to restore the final -m in summa. The author examines examples with the verb vindico which means “to claim a legal right to” and draws attention to the fact that in such cases the subject is more often an animate noun. In order to understand which word cena or aper is a more suitable candidate for the function of the subject in the passage under consideration, the author analyses the use of these words as subjects in other texts. The examples of the personification of cena are found mainly in poetry, whereas the word aper is discovered in one example which contains a verb usually used with animate subjects (intrare). The latter can be regarded as an additional argument for animateness of aper and its functioning as the subject of the sentence cum heri… vindicasset
This article deals with the conflict between mercy and just retribution in the work of Dracontius, a Roman poet from Vandal Africa of the 5th–6th centuries. This conflict is characteristic of many works by Dracontius, but the scholars have not yet reached a complete consensus on how the author views resolution or what he regards as more important. This paper attempts to unravel the rhetorical tangle woven by Dracontius through an analysis of the two poems united by the time of creation, the theme of the Trojan War, and a number of shared motifs: “The Abduction of Helen” and “The Tragedy of Orestes”. The conclusion is drawn that the trial, which formally appears only once in the finale of “The Tragedy”, actually recurs more frequently in these works, although not explicitly indicated. In particular, the opening scene of “The Abduction”, which features the prophecies of Helenus and Cassandra and their proposal to kill Paris, is built on the same principles as the trial of Orestes that concludes “The Tragedy”. They also correspond to Orestes’ seemingly extrajudicial retribution against Clytemnestra. The idea of connecting the Trojan War, the massacre in the house of Atrides, and the trial of Orestes in a legal (or rather, quasi-legal) context and presenting it to the reader in this form had already arisen in ancient literature before Dracontius. Such attempts can be found in Aeschylus, whose Oresteia is considered one of the primary likely sources for the Carthaginian poet. In Dracontius, this idea is developed and given a new, original expression, the treatment of which directly affects the understanding of both the stated problem — mercy vs justice, and the general meaning of the poems
The only two surviving poems by Sulpicius Lupercus still remain practically unexplored. Until now, the main object of researchers’ attention has been the portrait of the avids, wherewith Sulpicius Lupercus’ elegy “De cupiditate” is concluded; despite this, the identity of these avids has not yet been proven. This paper makes another attempt to analyse this portrait. Into account is taken not only the ecphrasis itself, but also its place in the elegy. The analysis of the elegy’s composition shows that the poem is structured in general in accordance with the rhetorical canon of epideictic speech. The previously advanced hypotheses that the portrait depicts a certain barbarian tribe seem unconvincing: thus, the expression barbaricae opes, the literal understanding of which serves as one of the main arguments for the attempts to identify the avids from the poem with a certain barbarian tribe, can also be understood idiomatically, which casts doubt on the seemingly unconditional mention of barbarians in the poem. It is more reasonable to assume that the ecphrasis, which is clearly based on the device of grotesque, depicts the teachers of rhetorics mentioned in the elegy shortly before the portrait; this assumption is supported, among other things, by the tradition of Renaissance editions of this Sulpicius Lupercus’ elegy. A cumulative consideration of the elegy from a compositional point of view allows a conclusion that the discussed portrait serves as a final figurative argument in an ethical invective against avidity as such