Abstract

The Sepulcrum incantatum, occasioned by a ghost story, is in all respects a plea typified by doubleness: on account of its subject (the son’s double death), its structure (epidiegesis, or double narratio of the facts), and its style (synonymy, alliterations, anaphoras, repetitions in all their forms). These obsessive repetitions confer an incantatory power on the text and transfigure the declamation into a real carmen, which must be read as a tremendous metatextual challenge for the rhetor in the literary model of the sorcerer which he aims to surpass.