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• Non re ma Cesare

  139–155

  Luigi Bessone

  Views:

  96

  La risposta di Cesare all’acclamazione a re si presta a due interpretazioni: o voluto gioco di parole sul cognomen Rex, proprio della gens Marcia (così le fonti greche ed espressamente Appiano), oppure messaggio di Cesare a sottolineare la sua superiorità sui re, alleati o vassalli del popolo romano. L’analisi delle testimonianze relative agli ultimi anni di Cesare porta alla seconda interpretazione, rettificando chi la ritiene formatasi con l’andar del tempo, a partire dai Flavi, che non possono più invocare la discendenza diretta, sostenendo invece che tale valenza fu conferita al cognomen dallo stesso dittatore.

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

  55–71.

  Ádám Rung

  Views:

  52

  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.