LE API DI VIRGILIO, SOMMO POETA ED ETOLOGO <em>ANTE LITTERAM</em>

Abstract

The poet Virgil is linked to honey bees both for his biography and for his literary works. Some verses of Virgil’s main works, the Bucolics, the Georgics and the Aeneid, are analyzed and interpreted, demonstrating a clear familiarity of the poet with these insects. In the Bucolics, honey bees play a symbolic role as well as in the Aeneid, where however their role is anything but marginal. As for the fourth book of the Georgics, what Virgil writes on the phenomena inherent to swarming is reinterpreted in a bio-ethological key, demonstrating how he had the opportunity to directly observe some phenomena of the life of the beehive still today poorly investigated from a scientific point of view. The poet Virgil can therefore be considered an ethologist ante litteram. A comparison is then made between some images on honey bees present in Virgil literary works and what, in relation to these insects, is found in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.