The high potential of minor poetry: notes on Hosidius Geta's reworking of Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics

This article aims to explore how Hosidius Geta integrates lines of Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics into his tragedy Medea, written in the form of a cento. I will try to show that Geta arranged the bucolic and georgic material in such a way that it works in a tragic text without generic dissonance. Departing from textual analysis of ll. 131-138 and 250-259 of the cento, I have sought to build on textual evidence to pinpoint how Geta used certain excerpts from the Eclogues and the Georgics and to explore the generic enrichment embedded in the reuse of these poems.