La formica ‘ancella del nero Orco’: modelli classici e tardo-antichi, fra Orazio, Virgilio e Claudiano, di Vn. poet. syll. 15 Z (= 104 R = 93 SB)

The article begins with the analysis of the figure of the ant, in its various conceptual and symbolic meanings, in some classical texts (Phaedr. 4, 25; Hor. serm. 1, 1, 32-35; Avian. 34; Mart. 6, 15 and Anth. Pal. 7, 209 = 57 Clack [the epitaph of the hymenopter written by Antipater of Sidon]), to focus on late-antiquity epigram from the Vnius poetae sylloge (15 Z = 104 R = 93 SB), where the insect is exceptionally projected in a dark hellish underworld, a vision completely foreign to the conception peculiar to traditional imagery. The author identifies and analyzes the sources of this short poem, quoted through an intertextual technique, sometimes in an emulative, sometimes antiphrastic manner (particularly Avianus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace and Claudian [De raptu Proserpinae]), showing how behind the disquieting icon of the ant as the Ogre’s maid and servant, “Plutonia” pillager of wheat / Ceres (in her double supera and inferna meaning), at the same time the image of the greed landowner of Horace’s satire 1, 1 looms and appears, in a negative, hostile and even infernal vision, in complete contrast to the fable (but also biblical) stereotype of provident industrious ant. The article concludes with an interpretative re-reading, also in light of the original epigram of the unus poeta, of the short story The Argentine Ant by Italo Calvino (1952).