Cothurnatus Maro. The Myth of Vergil as Tragic Poet, from Antiquity to the “Age of Anxiety” (and Beyond)

Already in antiquity it has been attributed to Virgil the vein of a tragic poet and later even a secret activity as a tragedian. The tendency to see the Aeneid as expression of a tragic Weltanschauung still occurs sporadically in the Modern age, only to assert itself definitively in the twentieth century. This study focuses on the role that European and American existentialism played in fostering the contemporary myth of cothurnatus Maro, as it created the intellectual climate in which the “heterodox” way of reading the Aeneid – and in general the Virgilian work – was formed and developed.