Umorismo e potere a Roma dopo Cicerone: continuità nei poeti augustei tra audacia e misura

This contribution aims to highlight the continuity between Cicero and the ‘Augustan’ poets Virgil and Horace - with attention to their early works, Bucolics and Satires - in the use of humor and related forms, such as wit, irony or salacity. In their writings, they all resorted to these means, with not only playful but also useful and serious purposes, and in various forms, moderate, sometimes daring or alternate – in the poets – with humble or self-ironic tones, due to their sense of moderation (modus). Despite the difficult (and often dramatic) historical-political context between the ages of Caesar and the second triumvirate, this shared taste for humor connects them, among other simila rities, and attests through allusions to the role of Cicero as a source for the two poets.