Banca de DEFESA: JOSE FELIPE SOARES DA SILVA

BETWEEN GREECE AND ROME: erotic love in the poetry of Sappho of Lesbos and Catullus

Greek archaic music; Latin lyric; Catullus; Sappho of Lesbos; erotic love. 

This dissertation aims to analyze poems and fragments of two poets of antiquity: Sappho of Lesbos and Catullus. The analysis in question is of a comparative character and is guided in a cut in which the specific theme of erotic love is the guide of these comparisons. For this, at first we aim to investigate how Greek archaic poetry occurs (in its different subgenres and representatives, exemplifying with excerpts from fragments of Sappho) and how it may have influenced later moments in Western literature, more specifically in the literature of ancient Rome. Second, it is intended to investigate the paths of Latin poetry, from its formation, to the time of Catullus, exemplifying with excerpts from his own poems. For this, we have the theoretical support of Lesky (1966); Jaeger (2013); Levi (2008); and Ragusa (2005); (2013), to discuss initially about Greek literature and its civilization. In this sense, we also used the support of Cardoso (2011); Grimal (2009); Bickel (1982); Martins (2009); and Veyne (2015), to discuss Latin literature and its civilization. Thus, we could see through the analytical observation of literary texts and discussions around them, that both poets have several points of contact, but also differ in certain aspects in the treatment of the theme proposed for analysis.