Su alcuni frammenti di Mecenate trasmessi da Seneca (epist. 114.5)

Seneca’s 114th Letter to Lucilius contains a series of quotations from Maecenas’ prose. These fragments, purposely quoted for their obscurity and linguistic oddity, present serious exegetical difficulties, which have always challenged interpreters. In this paper I carry out a reexamination of Maecenas’ fragments and propose in particular a new interpretation of one of them, recognizing in it the moralistic topos of nekròs bíos