Troia brucia. Come e perché raccontare l'Ilioupersis

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 work 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. The paradigm begins for us with the song of Demodocus in the Odyssey and with the multiplicity of signals of the Iliad. But 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. Then the field of investigation extends to the archaic lyric and Tragedy, particularly in Trojan dramas, Comedy, and to the iconography on the theme of Ilioupersis, from the Vase of Mykonos. We can also analyze the epic signs of the city's persis in the narratives of historiography and then in the evaluations and definitions of rhetoric.