In the monologue of Juno contained in the prologue of Seneca’s Hercules furens it is clear that the reuse
of various iuncturae and items of poetic vocabulary constitute sufficient signs to guide the reader along the
path of the Virgilian context in and with which Seneca wants to establish a comparison: indeed, once the
memory of the reader has been activated, these elements of comparison are numerous. Seneca not only
proposes a symmetry played out between the incipit of his work and that of two basic passages of the Aeneid,
placed at the beginning of the two halves of which Vergil’s epic consists (Aen. I 37-49 and VII 293 -322),
but reinterprets the deep structural links which Virgil had left implicit.
