DigitalUM :: Browsing by Subject "Novum / novitas"

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Deflexus solito cursu: Phaethon between Ovid and Manilius
(2019-04-12) Kyriakidis, Stratis
In a dialogue with the poets and philosophers of the past, Manilius in his first Book of his Astronomica uses the myth of Phaethon as one of the aetia for the creation of the Milky Way: Phaethon, the son of Sol, took his father’s chariot and, in a frenzied course, caused the conflagration of the universe; hence the creation of the Milky Way. Among the prior versions of the myth, Manilius sets his own story in direct dialogue with the Ovidian Phaethon in the Metamorphoses tracing an intentional convergence between the poet and his mythic character. With selected words and phrases, Manilius conveys his own poetic and philosophical views on the attainment of knowledge vis-à-vis passive ignorance (which may bring admiration and fear) and the conflict between the novumand the solitum, the tradition. The DRN of the Epicurean Lucretius is the text on which the Stoic Manilius relies in order to develop his own thoughts on the need to respect tradition as well as on the importance of the renewal of poetic discourse. The novum was a major pursuit in the poetry of all the great poets of the Augustan Age, but all depends on how this pursuit of the new ‘blends’ with the solitum coming from the past.