“I Am at the Service of Eros”: a Linguistic-literary Analysis of Alciphr. I 21 Between Rhetorical Treatises, Fictional Epistolography and Erotic Epigrams
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Abstract
The present study aims at carrying out a linguistic-literary analysis of the twenty-first letter that makes up the first book of the Alcifronean epistolary, structured from an ekphrasis around which the epistolary, as a πεπαιδευμένος, makes use of various resources offered by the manuals of rhetoric, with special attention to the use of the story and the commonplace as distinctive elements. This epistle, whose sender is Euplous and whose recipient is Thalasseros, describes the squandering of all the goods by the latter after having been enchanted by a musician who plays the lyre, and, consequently, the narrative framework appears characterized by the strong presence of the topic of the shipwreck of love, specifically the variant of the shipwreck on dry land, very frequent in the V and XII books of the Palatine Anthology. In this sense, this examination will allow us to offer an overview of those passages –belonging to erotic epigrammatic poetry– that are related to our letter from the point of view of amatory topification.
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