Aetna: composição, data e intertextualidade

Abstract

In this article, we first make comments on the contents and literary features found in an ancient poem named Aetna. This work comprises roughly 644 verses and has Mount Etna, in Sicily, as its theme. The form of this poem incorporates the main elements associated with the genre to which it belongs, the “didactic poetry”. Secondly, we present philological arguments (VOLK, 2005, p. 70) in order to situate the composition of this work probably in the second half of the first century AD. Finally,making use of intertextual studies, we relate passages from Aetna particularly to the epýllion near the end of Georgics IV and to Virgil’s Aeneid (book II).