Etymological Wordplay : From Greek Scholia to Ovid’s poetry of erudition

Résumé En

Latin etymology has been mainly influenced by Greek philology because Greek scholars were precisely read and interpreted in Rome. Latin poets have thus integrated their reading of Greek poems into their writing of poetry either in the choice of narrative motifs or in the use of figures and expressions inherited from Greek. Robin Schlunk in The Homeric Scholia and the Aeneid (1974) and Tilman Schmit-Neuerburg in Vergils Äneis und die antike Homerexegese (1999) have first demonstrated this point about the Aeneid. Etymologic wordplay is thus at the crossroads of different fields of study, insofar as it intersects ancient philology and poetics. We will study the way Ovid uses the Alexandrian scholia to make intertextual wordplays with Greek authors. This kind of erudite way of writing has already been studied, and it has been shown that, inter alia, Vergil and Ovid have integrated etymological wordplays thanks to philological notes coming from Alexandria or Pergamon – we are especially thinking about two contributions of Jean-Christophe Jolivet about the Dolonia and the abduction of Iphigenia in the epistula of Oenone to Paris, where etymological details reveal themselves by the lecture of Homeric scholia.