Illusione e morte: effetti del Sonno nella Tebaide

llusion and Death: Effects of Sleep in the Thebaid · This paper focuses on the personified Sleep in the Thebaid, who not only enacts a perfectly Ovidian ‘poetics of illusion’, exceeding his own Ovidian self of met., 11 in terms of paradox and spectacle, but also combines it with a ‘poetics of death’. Thanks to his soporific power, Sleep sets the stage for the Argives’ night-time slaughter of their sleeping enemies, thereby deepening the intimately problematic essence of this traditional epic scene in the light of its Homeric and Virgilian archetypes.