Oedipal mythemes in Pseudo-Quintilian’s Declamationes Maior 4 and Minor 306

Abstract

Declamations have been attesting to be a fruitful field for studying the relationship between rhetoric and drama, be it comic or tragic. Considering the theory of mythemes by Lévi-Strauss (1958) that deals with the structural elements of mythic narratives, we propose, in this article, to map the proximity between declamation and drama in order to ascertain a possible circulation of stories and mythemes, as defends Brescia (2015), in Latin literature, especially regarding the composition of declamations’ themes. To undertake this research, we took as a corpus for investigation the tragedy of King Oedipus told by Sophocles (Οἰδίπους Τύραννος) in the Greek context and by Seneca (Oedipus) in the Latin scope, together with Pseudo-Quintilian’s Declamationes Maior 4 and Minor 306, through which we will be allowed to glimpse a diffusion of themes that could give face and voice to the Roman mythopoetic heritage, carrier of a remote past, often sustained by mos maiorum.