Images of animals from Historia Naturalis in political rhetoric of Late Antiquity: Blossius Aemilius Dracontius’ lion

Abstract

The main subject of the paper is the representation of Pliny’s ‘bestiary’ in Late Antiquity. In particular, it concerns the image of the lion depicted in Book 8 of Historia Naturalis as the most gentle and merciful of carnivores. I try to argue that a Carthaginian 5th century author, Blossius Aemilius Dracontius, used this image to construct political allegories, but not in a complimentary way; rather, it served as a kind of ‘camouflage’, an instrument to disguise the criticism present in his texts, which were, in essence, political pamphlets. The main idea is that texts of different genres, written by Dracontius at different times, can be treated as one system, constructed by using of cross-cutting terms, characters and images in each poem. The image of a lion is one of the most popular in this sequence: it appears both in early works by the Carthaginian poet (dedication to Felicianus Grammaticus, known as Romulea 1; Controversia de statua viri fortis) and in later ones (Satisfactio; De Raptu Helenae; Orestis Tragoedia). Analysis of intertextual links shows that with the help of this image Dracontius tried to depict Vandal kings as rude and bloodthirsty creatures - not directly, because this could be too dangerous, but rather implicitly: the lion image, traditionally associated with Pliny’s description, served here as a kind of mask.