Una declamazione per burla. Il Iudicium coci et pistoris di Vespa (Anth. Lat. 199 R. = 190 Shackleton Bailey)

Vespa’s Iudicium coci et pistoris, one of the most famous pieces of the Anthologia Latina, looks like a poetic experiment, which places itself at the intersection of various literary genres. In this paper I aim at demonstrating that this short poem can be usefully read as a parodic declamation, a sort of comic transposition of a controversia included in Ps. Quintilian’s collection (decl. 268). At the same time, Vespa’s poem shows the decisive influence of another well-known example of a poetic controversia, the armorum iudicium in book 13 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.