The figure and myth of Adonis were brought to Rome by poets, and for this reason their “existence” in Latin culture was exclusively literary. In particular, the pathos of this story of love and death aroused the interest of the Neoteric and elegiac poets, who used Adonis as an exemplum to illustrate certain τόποι of their genre and to emphasize the originality of their poetry. Through analysis of the treatment of this figure in Propertius, it is possible to reconstruct the interesting dialogue that he conducted with other poets and undertake a study of the learned use of the exemplum in his oeuvre.
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