Encolpio, ?mujer abandonada? en Petronio (Sat. 81)

CARMIGNANI, M. F.

BUENOS AIRES

Jornada; XVIII Jornadas de Estudios Clásicos Maestros y discípulos en el mundo grecolatino; 2021

UCA

In Petronius? Satyricon 81, there is a very particular scene: Encolpius withdraws to a secluded place, while lamenting the decision of the fickle Giton, who chose Ascyltus as his lover. At that moment, Encolpius describes himself as Achilles stripped of Briseis, who walks by the sea crying in Iliad 1. However, when Encolpius arrives at that locus secretus, he punishes himself with impotence and decides to go out to take revenge, but first he utters a long monologue where he makes brief mentions of events that marked his life, shows his indignatio at the betrayal he suffered and attacks the vices of Ascyltus and Giton. In this monologue, a semantic field that has a long history in the Greco-Latin literary tradition appears clearly: the ?lament of the abandoned woman? topos. This topos runs through much of ancient literature, from Homer to Late Antiquity, including Euripides, Hellenism, Catullus, the elegiac poets and Virgil, among others. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the allusions to Catullus and Virgil present in this monologue of Encolpius linked to the topos of the abandoned woman, in order to determine its function within the Petronian literary texture.