Ilioupersis. La caduta di Troia in quattro atti, con un prologo, un epilogo e qualche nota di commento (sulle tracce epiche di Trifiodoro)

Ilioupersis, Troy is burning. The image is a symbol that crosses time, history, cultures, languages. Our imagery of the violence of war begins with the siege and fall of the city of Priam. The project aims to analyze and define, starting from the archaic Greek epic, the narrative structures and motifs that constitute the archetype of the fall of the city. We find the traditional plot and all the narrative motifs in the poems of the Cycle, in particular in the Ilias Parva by Lesches and the Ilii Excidium by Arctinus. All the traces that refer to the Ilioupersis of the archaic epic are investigated, cataloged and classified. First of all, in the Iliad and the Odyssey: all the other tales, the proleptic and analeptic signals and references to the fall of Troy, but also more generally the hints at the fall of any other city with the same or other protagonists. The fall of the city then appears to be a dominant theme, as Cleopatra's words to Meleager indicate in the account of the siege of Calydon in book 9 of the Iliad. There are narrative rules that also determine rhetorical and pragmatic effectiveness, the power to generate responses, actions, memory. Epic diction and thematic structures are traditional systems of meanings. It is therefore essential to define the values, the narrative motifs and their relationships starting with the name-epithet formulas and their applications. But remarkable results can be provided by the analysis of the formularity of the persis, with the verbal actions, the formulas for the city of Priam, the epithets, the metaphors and the similes. It is a complex set of formulas, but also of analogical variations, consolidated and extended, which arises from the success and diffusion of the theme in oral songs: it becomes the semiotic and narratological system of persis. If from the poems of the Cycle we have a few fragments and the meager summaries of the Ilias Parva and the Ilii Excidium, the signals become precious for understanding the fundamental structures of the traditional tales in the broader system of oral songs of the Archaic age. With all these texts and tools it is possible to interpret the epic narratives of Quintus Smyrnaeus: the logoi 12, 13 and 14 of the Posthomerica are entirely dedicated to the fall of the city. Thus, the same motifs recur in Triphiodorus's Halosis Iliou. They are the only extant broadest epic narratives: from the perspective of late antiquity they inherit strategies, thematic structures, motifs, epic language according to traditional schemes (with Hellenistic influences). Of course these narratives can introduce novelties or variations, in the epic diction, in the motifs, even in the realia, as is shown, for example, by the military tactics of the tortoise in the assault on Priam's palace.