Le armi improprie di Sceva: Suggestioni dalla Centauromachia ovidiana in Lucano (VI 169-179)

Two distinctive elements of Scaeva's epic aristeia (Lucan. VI 169-179) are taken into consideration in this article: the use of "irregular" weapons (a pile of allied corpses and the ruins of the crumbling wall of a fort), and the attack made on two enemies, crushing one's head with a stone and setting the other's hair and beard on fire. Firstly, the assortment of weapons used by Scaeva enhances the hyperbolic nature of his actions to the point of equating them to those of an entire army. Secondly, an in-depth analysis of lines 176-179 prompts us to detect a complex intertextuality between Lucan's passage and both the Aeneid(a widely recognised model), and Ovid's Centauromachy (specifically Ov. met. XII 287-289, and Ov. met. XII 271-279). Furthermore, Ovid's model allows Lucan to ultimately make a literary allusion to Horn. Od. IX 378-394.1 argue that in Sceva's aristeia the perversion of civilized values caused by the civil war is reflected both in the kind of weapons used by Scaeva and in his actions, which differ from those of the Homeric and Virgilian hero.