Dal consenso alla morte: riscrivere la storia di Cidippe in Italia tra Otto e Novecento
- Cydippe,
- Acontius,
- Reception Studies,
- Saffi,
- Bettini
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Abstract
Among the ancient stories that have come down to us, one of the most frequently forgotten is that of Cydippe, who was forced to marry Acontius after inadvertently pronouncing the oath engraved by the young man on an apple. Following a brief overview of the reception of this Hellenistic tale, this article analyses two Italian rewritings, the nineteenth-century version by Antonio Saffi (1829) and the late twentieth-century version by Maurizio Bettini (1998), with the aim of highlighting how the former brings the entire story within the confines of romantic love and how the latter identifies the deception of the apple as an exercise of ‘power’ by the written text over its reader.