The article investigates the medieval lore of the hagiographic legend Memoria sancti Michaelis (BHL 5948) containing the foundation myth of the Saint Michael’s Sanctuary on the Mount Gargano. In the first section of the paper a great deal of hagiographic collections and handbooks, mainly written by clerics of the Dominican Order, are taken into account for purposes of examining selections and content changes which the original text has undergone in the Medieval Reception. A culminating point of its transmission was the conflation of the hagiography in the most canonical collection by Jacobus de Voragine (The Golden Legend), who in turn drew from previous collectors, such as Bartolomeo da Trento and Jean de Mailly. Another section of the paper examines the reception of the legend of the Archangel in a sub-genre of Renaissance Latin poetry, the Fasti Christiani, of which the best exponents are Lorenzo Bonincontri, Ludovico Lazzarelli, Ambrogio Fracco and Girolamo Chiaravacci.

The recent discovery of a mosaic from Zeugma-Seleucia, showing Pasiphae and her Nurse who order Daedalus to make the wooden cow, provides a starting point for an investigation into the presence and role of this character in the myth of Pasiphae, on the basis of artistic and textual evidences, particularly the fragments of Euripides’ Cretans. Although the mosaic could be made combining other mythological scenes, it seems confirmed that the presence of the Nurse played a key role in Euripides’ lost drama.

After a rapid review of studies on the so-called Third Vatican Mythographer, the article examines a prologue to the work, missing in many MSS. and Mai’s and Bode’s editions. This prologue has been transimitted in at least two redactions, a shorter and a longer one. On the basis of the content and language, congruent with the work, both redactions seem original and the longer one may bear the trace of an early draft of the text

In act I of Plautus’s Truculentus the adulescens Diniarchus accuses the cunning maid Astaphium and her mistress Phronesium of having plundered his resources. The voracious maid denies him all further access to the meretrix’s home unless the lover brings more gifts. There is (vv. 139-151) a brief exchange of puns between the two characters, which depends on the double meaning of the expressions res pecuaria, scriptura, publicum and publicanus drawn from the conditions of leasing public land for farming in Italy. As those words first occur here with such a technical meaning, Plautus could have handled a Greek model freely enough to adapt the scene to the Roman fiscal procedures and even to contextualize it to the economic scenario of his time, depicting a growing tension between agriculture and large-scale pastoralism after the Hannibalic wars.

Il volume contiene l'edizione critica del testo agiografico dell'Apparitio di san Michele sul Monte Gargano (BHL 5948-5949, databile alla metà del VII secolo d.C.), corredato di traduzione, introduzione e note di commento dell'Autore, con i testi dell'additamentum alla versione originaria e di una redazione successiva (redatio alpha).

In the poem De reditu vv. 115-116 Rutilius Namatianus does not describe a rebirth of Rome, but rather its metamorphosis similar to that of Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Under this interpretation, the reading recinge transmitted by all manuscripts is being defended and preferred to several conjectures, such as refinge or retinge; the compound word re-cingere does not mean here “to gird on / to wreathe again”, which is suggested by many scholars, but not attested, except for two occurrences in Ammianus with a military meaning. Instead, it retains the proper meaning of “ungird”, “undress”, which best suits the metaphorical depiction of Rome here portrayed both as a woman (urbs personified and goddess) and a laurel tree; like Daphne, Rome changes her hair (taking off a robe) into green locks (the foliage).

The article examines the initial section of the so-called «narrative of Garganus and the bull» in the hagiographical text De Apparitione sancti Michaelis in Monte gargano, probably belonging to the second half of the eighth century. It suggests the interpretation of the term eventus in the usual sense of event, rather than adventus, in the light of both lexical occurrences of the term in similar contexts and the hagiographical account, which, of the word Garganus, aims to spread a new etymology more suited to the new religious climate.

The article reports the text and a comprehensive examination of an unpublished work written by the humanist Giovanni Segarelli from Parma. It contains a fictitious accusation apud inferos against the Roman Lucretia, wife of Collatinus here accused of lying and adultery, notwithstanding a well-established literary tradition as a chaste and blameless wife.

The article examines the reading coctaque (Pseud. 164) in the Palatine MSS., which is certainly corrupted, and the conjecture structaque; it then goes on to investigate the indirect tradition, represented by a quotation from Servius Auctus, Commentary on Aen. 1, 478: the scholium contains the reading 'unctaque', supported also by a passage from Cicero’s Paradoxa. Related to the context the reading 'unctaque' might be right, and 'ungere' might be used with the rare meaning of "to polish silver".

The present contribution offers a critical edition with commentary of an as-yetunpublished Greek translation of the hagiographical text on the Apparition of St. Michael over Mount Gargano (BHL 5948). This Greek version is witnessed by a single manuscript, Messan. gr. 29, created in the first decade of the fourteenth century in the Monastery of the Holy Savior in Messina.