Earthquakes and infernal imagery. On the reception of a Homeric passage in Latin epic and Lucretius

Abstract

In the ancient world, the chasm caused by earthquakes was considered as a passage between the world of the dead and that of the living. The paper aims to investigate this dystopian imagery in Latin poetry: the Nachleben of a famous Iliadic passage will be explored firstly in Latin epic (Virgil, Ovid, Silius Italicus and Statius) and then in a different and, in a sense, unexpected work, the didactic poem of Lucretius. In this respect, particular attention will be given to how Latin poets re-elaborate this imagery: in fact, they do not limit themselves to work over Homer’s text, but they also make reference to intermediary texts, according to a literary technique which has been defined as «window reference».