Oppiano, Halieutica I. Introduzione, traduzione e commento.

The Halieutica is a didactic poem, composed in hexameters, divided into five books and written by Oppian of Cilicia; it represents the arrival point of the epic and didactic literary tradition, whose initiators are Homer and Hesiod, and which has been renewed by the poetic leanings of the Hellenistic age. The poet drew inspiration from this rich tradition in organizing his ichthyological knowledges showed to the readers, in order to write not only a didactic poem but mainly a poetic one. In my thesis I translated the Halieutica’s first book into Italian and I wrote a commentary in order to inquire its poetic, zoological and stylistic aspects. In the introduction, I contextualized the poem in a well defined literary genre, providing some information about Oppian’s life; besides, I described Halieutica’s style, sources and metre, analysing in particular its versification and structure. In the final part, I put in my thesis an index of remarkable things and discussed passages and an iconographic appendix, which shows all the ichthyological species mentioned by Oppian. These sections help the readers to orient themselves into Oppian’s work, in order to know Halieutica’s world better.