Echoes of Latin comedy in More’s Epigrams

Abstract

This paper aims at an accurate and detailed analysis of some of the main echoes of the Latin comedy of Plautus and Terence in Morean epigrams. The fundamental Greek background from which More’s epigrams spring is somehow enriched by the Latin contributions by virtue, among other factors, of the cultural legacy of the language in which the humanist chose to write them. A contextualized analysis of the clearest echoes found allows distributing them in a general way in two global types: (1) those of a more formal nature (morphological, lexical-semantic, syntactic) and (2) those that convey a debt of content, concept, or topic; it is shown that both types can occasionally be interrelated in a particular and original way.