Genre and Rhetoric in the Reception of Virgil's Georgics: Poliziano's Rusticus as Didaxis and Epideixis

In this thesis I examine the generic and rhetorical underpinnings of Angelo Poliziano's Latin hexameter poem Rusticus (1483), an imitative introduction to agrarian didactic poetry that takes Virgil's Georgics as its primary source. To provide an account of how Poliziano utilizes his classical influences and their generic attributes in this work, I present in the first chapter a brief survey of the author's life and scholarship to establish context, and proceed, in the second chapter, with a close reading of the poem itself, paying special attention to its use of Greek and Latin models. In the third chapter I argue that to facilitate his exposition of agrarian didactic, Poliziano turns to conventions of epideictic rhetoric, and thus introduces the genre by combining its defining features into an epideixis of the rustic life. In the last chapter, I explore the generic admixture of bucolic and didactic elements that pervades the poem, analyzing its tradition in Virgil and later Roman literature, as well as its role in Poliziano's epideixis.Master of Art