Centoni secolari del Codice Salmasiano ed Appendix Vergiliana. Parodia ed insufficienza della retorica eroica

The authors of the Salmasian Virgilian centos are grammarians; therefore, their testimony about the reuse of the poems of the Appendix Vergiliana could have, in order to the authorial question of the Appendix poems, the same value of the so-called testimonia vetera; so, it is important to investigate it. I have already been able to demonstrate that the poet of the cento Hercules et Antaeus has reused a segment of a verse of the pseudovirgilian Aetna. It is now my intention to extend the investigation to two other centos of the Salmasian series: those defined by McGill as ‘secular’ (7 and 8 Riese2). The choice is not accidental; in fact, the thematic distance of these centos from the heroic rhetoric of the Virgilian epic, as well as from the georgic and bucolic matter, makes them privileged candidates for the recourse by the centonists to fontes different from the major Virgilius’ works. As we will see, Virgilian Appendix poems are provided in the two centos.