L'evidenza drammatica negli Inni epico-narrativi di Callimaco: I, III, IV

This paper investigates the question of the communicative destination of Callimachus’ Hymns I, III and IV, the so-called “epic-narratives”. Since they belong to the genre of the rhapsodic hymn, they reproduce communication procedures typical of a primary orality. Alongside the traditional rhetorical material, functional to the presence of a listener, the poet of Cyrene introduces into these texts a good dose of mimesis, through a large number of figures and stylistic features more specifically related to the forms of drama as representation: peculiar use of rhetorical questions, alternation between ‘Er-Stil’ and ‘Du-Stil’, passage from indirect to direct speech (and vice versa), etc. Given the large number of such proceedings, it is possible to suppose that Callimachus imagined a public destination of these hymns.