… Quid sit Amor… •

Abstract

The paper examines the parallelisms in the poetic presentation of love as a phenomenon and Love as a divine figure in the fragments of the Aeolian poetess Sappho and in Vergil's Eclogues. Having shown the strong echoes of Sappho's opus in the Roman culture of Vergil's time, the research focuses on analogies at the semantic and expressive level. The two poets share a vision of love/Love as a deeply destructive force, which threatens human existence – a vision introduced by Hesiod – but they also share some refined models of sublimating that destructiveness. The paper particularly explores those models and the layering of thought that the motif of love acquires, thanks to them.