Chapter L’Ephemeris di Ausonio e l’autobiografia del quotidiano: riflessioni a partire da un’analisi del carme 1

Abstract

This paper focuses on poem 1 (and partly 2) as a case study to assess the kind of autobiography depicted in Ausonius’ Ephemeris. Our analysis reveals a linguistic and metric poikilía, an interweaving of everyday life and sublime burlesque, based on the allusion to both satirical and lyrical-elegiac models. Though it is impossible to assign the Ephemeris to a specific literary genre, it is also misleading to reduce it to a scholastic work. In this original autobiography of daily life, Ausonius revisits, in a dramatized way, the literary scheme of the ordinatio diurna, as a form of ideal self-representation. As in the Bissula, he plays with the interaction of different genres and transposes onto a literary level the image of his domestic life, which is also an image of his skill as a poet.