ABSTRACT
In Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC the cult of Adonis, as celebrated by women in particular, inspired the humour of comic poets, while its funerary aspect is described by Plutarch. The poetic impact of this piece was evidently extremely powerful: Ronsard, Marino, La Fontaine, Shelley and D'Annunzio were all haunted by it. Lope de Vega was responsible for one of the few interesting attempts to transfer the legend to the stage. At first sight, nothing could appear more composite than this work; it is mythological, pastoral, chivalrous, erotic, scientific and initiatory. In Spenser people find three different versions of the myth, which underlie the three different ways in which it is viewed in English poetry. As people has already seen, Spenser has exploited this technique to endow Sidney with the attributes of Adonis; while Shelley himself had translated Bion's Adonis elegy.
