Lettere dal carcere. Spazi di autobiografia nella poesia di Draconzio

Letters from prison.
Ranges of autobiography in the poetry of Dracontius

This study examines some of the ways in which Dracontius’ prison experience is represented and dramatized in his ‘prison writings’: Satisfactio, Epithalamium Ioannis et Vitulae (Romul. 7), De laudibus dei (last section of Book III). The account of the crucial event in the poet’s biography, the only one of which he substantially reports, moves within broad and general literary and scriptural clichés, but always keeping in mind as its main referent the Ovid of the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto. Dracontius conforms, in several respects and on several levels, his own story to that of Ovid’s exile, in texts in which real autobiography and literary autobiography, life and poetry end up coinciding.