El influjo de la poesía virgiliana en el Persilessituaciones argumentales y personajes.

Abstract

Amongst classical traditions which exert an influence on Cervantes' Persiles (1617), Virgil's takes pride of place. In order to closely prove this textual reality, we have analyzed Episode II, 17, whose characters, plot situations and thematic motifs have all been created following reelaborations of hypotexts, which mainly belong to Books II and IV of The Aeneid, and where Cervantes himself makes use of a very expressive simile to openly link his main characters with the original figures. The analysis, based on an immanentist methodology about intertextuality, is to draw an outline of Virgilian reminiscences, either already noticed or unobserved by specialists, which contribute to reestructuring the Episode and generating in the reader a process of decodification and anagnorisis of contrasts and parallels. Likewise, our analysis simultaneously raises a problematic question about cases of contaminatio between Heliodorus and Virgil, and the far from dispensable possibility of Virgil's previous influence on the drawing of characters and scenes in the Aethiopica.