<I>La parola a Didone: esercizi di confutazione (Quando si confuta una storia, 3)</I>

Abstract

The contribution aims at showing how the same “revisionism” attested in Greek tradition about Homer and the Trojan war can be detected in the Vergilian tradition as well. Specific attention is paid to the fabula lascivientis Didonis told in the “Aeneid” but rejected by a large part of literary tradition and, among others, by an epigram attributed to Ausonius (Opuscula 23, 2, p. 420 Peiper). In this poem Dido herself is speaking, telling the truth about her own story and radically refusing Vergil’s arrangement of the meeting between the queen and Aeneas: a situation which recalls the rhetoric exercise of anaskeué or refutatio. Moreover, the opening of the poem, with the formula ille ego, seems to consciously allude to the so-called pre-proemium of the Aeneid.