La creazione degli animali in Draconzio (laud. Dei, 1, 234-328): tra tradizione biblica e classica

Lines 234-328 of Book 1 of Dracontius’ De laudibus Dei describe the events of the fifth and sixth days of Creation, where animals are the protagonists: the poet devotes surprising space to them, in comparison to other hexametrical rewritings of Genesis, and shows his complete acquisition of the practices of paraphrase and versification that are proper to rhetorical teaching. Some detailed tableaux that are dedicated to the entry of animals into the universe, in particular the one concerning the elephant, a creature unknown to the biblical model (v. 307-309), reveal Dracontius’ remarkable literary creativity. The story is generally faithful to the text of the Old Testament, following, in addition to the classical models, the patristic exegesis (and Ambrosius in particular) and some metrical paraphrases of the biblical source.