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• The Haughty Soul of the Avenger: The Myth of Lucius Brutus in the Aeneid (6,817–823)

  55–71.

  Ádám Rung

  Views:

  51

  In Book 6 of the Aeneid, Virgil constructs his own version of an epic Underworld and, innovatively, combines it with a panoply of future Roman heroes. This article focuses on the laconic introduction given to one of these heroes, Lucius Iunius Brutus, the founding father of the Roman Republic. More specifically, it examines the opening lines of a striking passage that, in an act of diction that has puzzled readers since antiquity, applies the adjective superbus to Brutus, rather than to his adversary, Tarquin the Proud, whose cognomen bears precisely this meaning. To interpret these lines, the article will attempt—using other literary versions of the work combined with comparative material from similar narratives—to reconstruct the traditional story of Brutus as it was known to Virgil and his contemporaries to determine, firstly, if this elucidates what such a retelling would have meant to the Augustan reader and, secondly, what its possible political and cultural implications would be if read with the traditional myth in mind.

• A Critique of a Satire - Constantine Acropolites’ Letter on the Timarion

  157–164.

  Tamás Mészáros

  Views:

  245

  The protagonist of the satire Timarion, by an unknown author from the 11th or 12th century, falls into a state of suspended animation on his journey and is carried by two demons into the underworld, where he proves in a court trial that he is not dead and is allowed to return to the living. The aim of this paper is to present and interpret a short letter written two hundred years later by Constantine Acropolites, who sharply criticises the Timarion, without clearly presenting his objections.