Quattro note filologiche ed esegetiche all'VIII libro delle Metamorfosi di Apuleio

The article consists of four philological and exegetical notes on the VIII book of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. A first note highlights the detail, so far remained unnoticed, of how the venabulum offered by Thrasyllus to Tlepolemus when they are about to start chasing the boar, and the weapon that he instead keeps for himself, the lancea, are evidently already part of the character's murderous strategy. The venabulum can in fact be used exclusively as a throwing weapon, and after having thrown it against the boar, wounding it without finishing it, Tlepolemos will remain disarmed and helpless. Thrasyllus, on the other hand, who has reserved for himself the lancea, which is also a cutting weapon, can use it twice in this way, first to cut the hocks of his companion’s horse, then to give the fatal blow to Tlepolemos by piercing his right thigh (but still maintaining possession of the weapon, the wound of which will be confused with those caused by the tusks of the enraged boar); only the third time, to kill the aper, will he finally use the lancea as a throwing weapon. The delivery of the venabulum instead of the lancea to Tlepolemus is therefore not a random distribution of equivalent weapons, but is the very first part of the deadly deception plotted by Thrasyllus. A second note proposes, on the basis of a whole series of coherent intertextual and intratextual parallels, to correct at met. 8, 5, 8 the participle supinatus in supinatum, referring it (together with the ablative toto tergo) to Tlepolemus and not to his horse, with the result, decidedly more effective on a dramaturgical level, of shifting the focus of attention from the mechanics of the fall of the horse to that of the protagonist of the episode. The third note discusses the participle quirītans of met. 8, 6, 5, not only proposing to correct it in the frequentative querĭtans, more suitable for the intense and prolonged lament of Charite, but also discussing the probability that other occurrences of the same verb have been, both in the course of the manuscript tradition and in modern editions, confused with forms of the delocutive quirīto, therefore obscuring, in the texts that have come down to us, the actual occurrences of the frequentative. The fourth and final note focuses on the brief Apuleian description, in met. 8, 7, 7, of the imago of Tlepolemus in the form of the god Liberus prepared by Charite in mourning, and of the cult paid to it by her. This Bacchic disguise of Tlepolemus (a character already shown on other occasions masked and even en travesti), partly present in the mythographic tradition of Protesilaus and Laodamia, brings him closer, on the level of iconographic imagery, to the character of Antinous, the famous lover of Hadrian, who also received honors divine after his death, and whose statues – scattered by his august lover in mourning throughout the empire – often see him in the guise of various divinities, and in particular as Bacchus. Moving from the literary and iconographic models of this Apuleian passage to its subsequent fortune as a model of the mythographer Fulgentius, it is shown how the oxymoric final of met. 8, 7 – in which it is underlined how the solacium sought through the imago of the beloved actually becomes for Charite a new cruciatum – has in all probability inspired Fulgentius for the construction of the first and most programmatic of his chapters of allegorical exegesis. At myth. 1, 1, in fact, the very genesis of idolatry is traced back to the construction, by a grieving father, of a statue of his dead son, which for him becomes a torment rather than a relief from pain. Even the Fulgentian mention of the servants who pay divine honors to this statue may have developed on the basis of the discussed Apuleian syntagm adfixo servitio.