Sull’interpretazione di un controverso locus ausoniano: Lud. 108 Green

The article examines the problematic line 108 of Ausonius’ Ludus septem sapientum (at ille captans funeris instar sui), traditionally regarded as corrupt for metrical, syntactic, and semantic reasons. After reviewing the main solutions proposed by scholarship, the paper defends the transmitted reading captans and argues that the realization of the eighth element of the iambic senarius with a short syllable should be explained not as a case of “freedom of Jacobsohn”, but as a prosodic licence attested in Late Antique iambic poetry. Finally, in order to restore syntactic coherence to the passage, it tentatively proposes correcting at to it, which allows the scene to be reconstructed as Croesus advancing toward the place of his execution.