he Sea of the Laestrygonians: Monsters, Cults and Prodigies at Terracina and in Its Territory. Myths, Legends and Ancient Sources between Anxur, Circe and the Peoples of Latium

This study collects and verifies against primary sources the ancient attestations of extraordinary events, monstrous creatures, and mythically descended peoples associated with Tarracina (modern Terracina) and its immediate surroundings — the Circeian promontory, Formiae, Sperlonga, Fundi. The documentary core consists of the prodigies recorded by Livy and by the late-antique epitome of Julius Obsequens, in which Tarracina repeatedly appears as the setting of extraordinary phenomena, including the well-known sighting of “serpents of remarkable size” in the sea near the harbour (Livy XXVII, 4, 13, 210 BC). A preliminary section of textual criticism demonstrates that the Tarracine prodigies earlier than 190 BC, habitually cited in local scholarship as “Obsequens”, in fact belong to the supplement reconstructed by Konrad Lycosthenes in 1552 and must be restored to Livy, with a significant topographical correction. These are complemented by sources on the Italic localisation of the myths of Circe and the Laestrygonians, Pliny’s mention of the city of Amyclae “destroyed by serpents”, the cult of Iuppiter Anxur and Feronia in the Aeneid and in Servius, and the testimony of Tacitus and Suetonius on the “gulf of Amyclae” near Sperlonga, where in AD 26 the collapse of Tiberius’s grotto occurred amid statuary of the Homeric cycle (Polyphemus, Scylla). A separate chapter is devoted to the modern journalistic afterlife of these myths, treated explicitly as contemporary reception rather than as historical fact. The method adopted is that of systematic verification of every citation against the original critical text, with a graded epistemic vocabulary (attested / plausible / conjectural), and the exclusion of every source not directly verifiable.