MALATO DI RETORICA: I DISCORSI SACRI DI ELIO ARISTIDE

Malato di retorica: i "Discorsi sacri" di Elio Aristide Aelius Aristides' Sacred Tales are one of the strangest works in ancient literature. Despite the usual sophistication and complexity of Aristides' style, they appear like a spontaneous writing with little formal elaboration. The main purpose of the research is to investigate the work's stylistic dimension in search of motives of its otherness. The religious dimension, within which the story told underlies, is analyzed in order to identify personal contibutions of the Author. There are several texts involved in the main text, so it is not easy to identify precisely the boundaries: textual analysis can provide some hypothesis about Aristides' choices. The confusion of the narrative levels could answer to a specific intentionality. This work aims also to delve in the the anthropological and cultural scenario in which the author lived in order to understand some dynamics as the proud exhibition of the body. Performance is a keyword in the sophistic movement and rhetoricians are increasingly threatened in their prestige because of the rivalry. It was analyzed also the "bias" for self-praise, so massive in Aristides'corpus, as witnessed by Or. 28. Finally, the epic dimension of the narrative, in which the author presents himself several times as a new Ulysses: the identification with the homeric hero conveys many suggestions of which the author seems to be conscious.