Публикации автора

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