Legifer

The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Greco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element-the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the formal, aesthetic and religious transformations of ancient poetics in Late Antiquity. The Poetics of Late Latin Literature attempts to capture the excitement and vibrancy of the living ancient tradition reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of great Latin writers mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries AD. A series of the most distinguished expert voices in later Latin poetry as well as some of the most exciting new scholars have been specially commissioned to write new papers for this volume.

Poetry is a kind of discourse distinct from ordinary, everyday speech; it is an institution, a kind of speech that a society has marked as special, with special rules applying to its production and reception. Didactic poetry is a kind of poetry that it aims to instruct (Toohey, 2013: 2). In didactic poetry the reader is invited to consider not just the message and the brilliant language of its exposition, but what lies behind the message, the human values and the vision which the poem embodies. The article analyzes the work of Orientius “Commonitorium” and his role as an innovative writer of Latin didactic poetry as well as his position in the landscape of late antique literature of the 5th century AD. The aim of the article is to show to what extent the defining characteristics of the genre can be found in Orientius’ poem “Commonitorium” and to trace the permutations of these features throughout the text. A full range of issues, which scholarship on Orientius has hitherto neglected, will be studied: the “poetics” of the work, that is the poetic selfawareness expressed in the poem, as well as techniques of composition, rhetorical argumentation, strategies of persuasion and narration, intertextual allusions, relationship with contemporary works and other aspects. Scientific novelty. Whereas Latin poetry flourished under the reign of Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD) and the first century AD, only few poetic works survived which were produced in the later second and third century AD. After a long period of silence, Latin poetry had its comeback in late antiquity when in the 4th century AD various writers started composing poetic genres again. Instead of Rome, other locations became important breeding grounds for the production of literature, especially Gaul, where writers such as Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Sulpicius Severus, Sidonius Apollinaris and others were active. Whereas the genres composed by late antique writers were more or less the same as in Classical literature, most of their works differ in content and meaning (Gasparov, 1982: 2; Johnson, 2000: 335–337). Late antique writers were deeply familiar with their Classical literary predecessors, but due to the influence of Christian religion, the character of Latin literature produced in late antiquity also differs significantly from the works which were written by pagan writers in the preceding centuries. This article discusses the work of a poet who has been rarely studied so far. Orientius, whom the majority of scholars now identify with the homonymous bishop of Augusta Ausciorum (modern Auch, France) in Southern Gaul, is an important representative of didactic poetry and his work constitutes an important example in the history of the genre. His didactic poem with the title “Commonitorium”, in elegiacs was probably written around 430 AD. In conclusion, the “Commonitorium” presents itself as a serious poem concerned with issues of paramount importance to humanity. The question of what exactly the “Commonitorium” endeavours to teach is indeed of major importance for understanding the work. It claims to be truly universal work, encompassing everything that exists. Within two books, Orientius reveals to his readers/students the way to reach salvation, both gives us specific, concrete information and tells us how we should live our lives, how we should relate to our fellow human beings and to God.

An Instance of alchemical Initiation : the « Letter of Isis to Horus » In keeping with the practices customary in occult sciences during the first centuries AD, the short alchemical Greek treatise known as the "Letter of Isis to Horus" presents the secret recipe for the preparation of gold and silver as the result of an act of revelation. A number of themes characterizing late minor literature can be detected in it : initiation in exchange for a sexual favour, the oath of the initiate, the law of silence, and transmission of the secret to one's son only. In the present article, these themes are examined in the light of their connections with the "Corpus Hermeticum", astrology, Gnosis and, particularly, magical papyri.

Reviewed by: Reading Late Antiquity ed. by Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed, Mats Malm Serena Causo Reading Late Antiquity Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed and Mats Malm, eds. Heidelberg: Winter-Verlag, 2018. Pp. 267. ISBN: 978-3-8253-6787-9 This book is a collection of thirteen contributions from the conference entitled “Reading Late Antiquity,” held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sweden in 2015, with the aim of exploring the current field of reception studies on Late Antiquity. Despite the different methodologies and the diverse content of the contributions, the collection succeeds in a remarkable coherence of purpose, through a functional partition of the volume in three parts, masterfully arranged to guide the reader from the most traditional interpretations to the most dynamic appropriations of late antique literary heritage throughout the centuries. Common to all the contributions is the willingness to assess the independence and uniqueness of Late Antiquity, in constant exchange with other historical periods. In the first section of the book, “Theoretical Outlooks,” traditional theoretical concepts related to Late Antiquity are reversed, thus offering new interpretations of late antique literature. For example, in “Untimely Antiquity,” James Uden subverts the cliché of “untimeliness” of the late antique and positively describes it as the ability of this literature to contain multiple temporalities, recalling the past and anticipating future spirits and periods. Another old trope is subverted in the study by Marco Formisano. He appropriates the past scholarly definition of “decadent” and turns it into an aesthetic paradigm of Late Antiquity which was responsible of producing a sense of instability and disruption with the earlier literary tradition, resulting in thematic and formal features (e.g. fragmentation, allegories, displacement and discontinuity) which are distinctive to this period. Jesús Hernández Lobato advocates Late Antiquity as a major parallel for the postmodern era in which a problematic relationship between philosophy and language turns into a condition of apophaticism, a pronounced mysticism, a tendency to deconstruction, expressions of a crisis of the “logocentrism.” The second section of the book, “Decadence and Decline,” expands the discussion of late antique literature to decadentism and investigates those views that shaped the common perception of Late Antiquity as a period of decline thereafter. Late antique aesthetic, poetics and sensibilities seem to find a close parallel in the postmodernist culture. Accordingly, Olof Heilo’s study convincingly argues that when Burckhardt in his early work Die Zeit Constantin’s des Großen (1835) reinforced the idea of degeneration (ausarten) of late antique literature, he was projecting onto it the strong contempt of his own time, in which he experienced a similar sense of decadence and disharmony. In his own contribution, Scott McGill uses Huysmans’s novel, À rebours (1884), to demonstrate the marginalization of late Latin literature in nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle France, when late antique literature was charged with aesthetic value only among decadent movements; Des Essaints, “the decadent antihero” of the novel, is taken as the paradigm of this [End Page 269] marginalization. A comparison between the fall of the Roman Empire and the decline of the hegemony of modern Europe emerges prominently after the World War I, especially in O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. In his contribution Stefan Rebenich discusses the innovative perceptions of Late Antiquity developed by Spengler that transcend stereotypes and especially value the continuity of this period. Rutilius Namatianus and his unfinished poem De redito suo are the focus of Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed’s contribution. The narration of the melancholic travels of this fifth-century Latin poet through the ruins of the Roman Empire and his dreams of recovery of the past glory were praised in post-revolutionary France and even more during the Italian decadentist movement, where it gained great popularity in the fascist context. In the twentieth century the Viennese writer Alma Johanna Koenig chose Byzantium as the setting for her work Der Heilige Palast (1922), and Ottorino Respighi and Claudio Guastalla similarly set La Fiamma (1934) in Byzantine Ravenna. The vitality of Late Antiquity as an historical frame is among the motivations that underlie Henriette Harich-Schwarbauer’s contribution on Koenig’s work: she highlights how the empress Theodora of Der Heilige Palast moves in a...

Este artigo pretende salientar alguns trechos de obras que demonstram o modo como a escrita de epístolas era concebida na antiguidade greco-romana até o período clássico (século I d.C.). Enquanto, na literatura grega, o tratado “Sobre o estilo” (Perì hermēneías) de Demétrio possui um trecho importante que trata das características das epístolas, na literatura latina, o material mais expressivo sobre o assunto são as próprias correspondências dos principais epistológrafos como Cícero, Sêneca e Plínio o Jovem. Dessa forma, será possível delinear as características formais do gênero, suas propriedades essenciais e seus tópoi.

Sextus Aurelius Victor was an imperial bureaucrat whose life spanned most of the fourth century AD. Harry Bird describes how Victor, a man of humble African origin, acquired by virtue of his education and personal qualities a consular governorship in Pannonia and the urban prefecture at Rome. Victor's short historical monograph, the De Caesaribus , reveals his attitudes towards education, culture, history and politics - attitudes which probably reflect those of a considerable segment of fourth-century society. We can therefore glimpse how the emperors, the senate, the army and the bureaucracy were perceived, how the changing role of Rome was regarded by many in the West, what was thought of certain provinces and their inhabitants and what was considered to be the raison d'etre of the writing of history. All these, together with other minor topics, are explored in Harry Bird's thorough investigation into Victor's life and work. This book will interest students of late Latin literature and thought and those involved in late imperial and early medieval history. It should also appeal to scholars engaged in the study of the Historia Augusta, whether they agree with its findings or not.

The centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire in the west and the Renaissance are loosely called the ‘Middle Ages’. Waves of barbarian invaders, Goths, Huns and Vandals, swept over the imperial frontiers in the last decades of the fourth century AD until Alaric, King of the Visigoths, eventually captured and sacked Rome itself in the last year of his life, 410. The submergence of Roman civilisation under the invading hordes was such that the period from the fall of Rome to the later eleventh century has been labelled the ‘Dark Ages’, and the term ‘Middle Ages’ applied more limitedly to the period from the twelfth century to the Renaissance. The Dark Ages were not uniformly dark. We caught a glimpse of the fifth-century literary mind in the last chapter when we cast our eyes forward to see the longterm effect of the decay of oratory into declamation in the first century AD. The Frankish King Charlemagne (c.742–814) was inspired to extend his rule in all directions with the hope of recreating the Christian empire of Constantine. Eventually he seized the crown of Lombardy and took the papacy under his protection. In 800 AD he was crowned by the Pope as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. His patronage was such that historians speak of the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.

Frankish and local technological traditions in greyware pottery production at l'esquerda (Catalonia), 7th-9th centuries AD: Examining distribution patterns and exchange at the southern Carolingian border

Histories of Latin literature have often treated the period from the second to the seventh centuries as an epilogue to the main action – and yet the period includes such towering figures as Apuleius, Claudian, Prudentius, Augustine, Jerome, Boethius, and Isidore. The Cambridge History of Later Latin Literature, with fifty chapters by forty-one scholars, is the first book to treat the immensely diverse literature of these six centuries together in such generous detail. The book shows authors responding to momentous changes, and sometimes shaping or resisting them: the rise of Christianity, the introduction of the codex book, and the end of the western Roman Empire. The contributors' accounts of late antique Latin literature do not shy away from controversy, but are always clear, succinct, and authoritative. Students and scholars wanting to explore unfamiliar areas of Late Antiquity will find their starting point here.

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 395 its own sometimes cumbersome and inelegant subtitle. The rationale for this is clear, but it does have the undesirable effect of significantly disrupting the reading process, a paradoxical quality in a work which seeks to deepen our fascination with the immersive potential of stories. University of Bristol Vanda Zajko The Reception of the HOMERIC HYMNS. Edited by Andrew Faulkner, Athanassios Vergados, and Andreas Schwab. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp. xiv, 409, 17 figures. As the HOMERIC HYMNS offer stories and epithets about the gods not found elsewhere in ancient literature, and as they were often (but not always) ascribed to Homer, one might have suspected that they enjoyed a wide circulation in the Greco-Roman world. But that was not necessarily the case. The longer hymns are certainly part of performance in the archaic and classical periods but, other than Thucydides’ reference to the hApollo at 3.104.2–6, direct quotations or clear allusions to them are scarce in the classical period. Plato, for example, never mentions them in spite of his frequent reference to hymnic poetry. The Library at Alexandria most likely preserved a collection of the Hymns in some form (although certainly not in the form we have today) but there is no clear reference to them by Hellenistic scholars. In Callimachus and Apollonius one can occasionally detect learned quotations or strong verbal echoes, again mostly to the longer hymns, but here again verbal evidence is far more scant than one might have expected. Philodemus in the first century b.c.e. “may have brought the collection to Rome,” as the editors write (21). But, again, in what form? Even then the relative paucity of strong verbal echoes in Latin literature is noteworthy. A single copy of thirty-one hymns survives into late antiquity, it being the sole ancestor of the later Renaissance manuscripts, but our understanding of the transmission of the Hymns in the Byzantine period is limited. Only from the Renaissance forward can we clearly speak of influence and imitation. All this makes the study of reception, prior to the Renaissance, spotty and problematic. The volume consists of an Introduction by its three editors and seventeen chapters arranged in five parts. Part I on “Narrative and Art” comprises a single chapter, by Jenny Strauss Clay, containing a fine discussion of “representation” of stories in texts and on Greek vases. Focusing primarily on the hHermes, Clay suggests that a Caretan blackfigure hydria (circa 530 b.c.e.) “combines and compresses” (46) numerous scenes from the hymn (the theft and hiding of the cattle, the dais, and Apollo’s attempt to bind his brother, among others) into a compelling narrative of its own. She also proposes that the hymn was performed in the context of the symposium. Part II on “Latin Literature” (five chapters) jumps abruptly to the Roman period, followed by Part III on “Imperial and Late Antique Literature” (five chapters) and Part IV on “Byzantine Literature” (two chapters) before the study of reception gains firmer ground in Part V on “Renaissance and Modern Literature” (four chapters), which in this volume ends in 1826. To the editors’ credit, all of the chapters are unusually well integrated, due to a gathering of all the contributors to discuss pre-circulated papers. Prior to the Renaissance, much in this reception story remains speculative. Hard evidence is often lacking; attested parallels are more often than not thematic or structural rather than verbal or textual. One frequently reads contributors describing influences or reworkings as “plausible,” “possible,” “detected,” or even “weak.” With the paucity of 396 PHOENIX firmer evidence, the editors in the Introduction are overly confident, in my judgment, in asserting the Hymns’ popularity in the Hellenistic period and in making claims about intertextuality in this period. In particular, they are too quick to dismiss S. Douglas Olson’s detailed argument (8, n. 35)1 that many of the repeated phrases detected in this period stem from commonplace archaic hexameter phrasings. In short, the volume would have been stronger with a full chapter devoted to reception in the classical and Hellenistic periods (rather than the brief summary it offers, 4–15). Especially when dealing with...

SE HA ESTUDIADO EL DIALOGO COMO GENERO LITERARIO TEORICO, SIGUIENDO EL MODELO DE SCHAEFFER. COMPROBADA SU DEFINICION COMO CLASE REGIDA POR LA MODULACION HIPERTEXTUAL, SE HA ANALIZADO LA SUBCLASE "DIALOGO NARRATIVO", CONCRETAMENTE LOS DIALOGOS DE SULPICIO SEVERO, QUE CONSTITUYEN EL PRIMER DIALOGO NARRATIVO EN LATIN. ESTOS HAN ACTUADO COMO HIPOTEXTO PARA LOS DIALOGOS NARRATIVOS DE GREGORIO MAGNO, EN LA ANTIGUEDAD TARDIA, Y PARA UNA LINEA GENEALOGICA QUE SE PROLONGA POR TODA LA EDAD MEDIA. SE HAN INTEGRADO EN LA SUBCLASE LOS TEXTOS PREVIOS (DESDE EL "DE POETIS" ARISTOTELICO, A LOS TEXTOS DIALOGADOS DE LOS PERIPATETICOS, PASANDO POR LA "VIDA DE EURIPIDES" DE SATIRO, Y ALGUNOS DE LUCIANO. EN HIPOTESIS SE HA TRABAJADO CON LOS FRAGMENTOS DE TEXTOS PERDIDOS, COMO EL "CATO MINOR" DE CICERON. ADEMAS, SE HAN TENIDO EN CUENTA TEXTOS TEORICOS SOBRE EL DIALOGO, COMO EL DE BASILIO DE CESAREA O EL DE ELIO TEON SOBRE LA NARRACION DIALOGADA. EL MODELO TEORICO HA SIDO EL DEL ARCHITEXTO DE GENETTE, EN EL QUE HAN ENTRADO, JUNTO AL GENERO LITERARIO UN ANALISIS SOBRE EL GENERO DEL DISCURSO (BAJTIN, TODOROV), CONCRETAMENTE EL PASO DE LA ORALIDAD A LA ESCRITURA EN LA ANTIGUEDAD TARDIA, Y LOS MODOS DE ENUNCIACION, CON UNA DIVISION DEL GENERO EN CUATRO SUBCLASES, Y UN ANALISIS NARRATOLOGICO DE TODO EL TEXTO.

The chapter considers works of late Latin literature that offer an array of facts or data; works resulting from the author’s attempts to provide a coherent, comprehensive and organized exposition of human knowledge, and therefore conceived from an encyclopedic standpoint. These works display one or the other of two approaches to knowledge. One is a complete approach to the knowledge of nature, such as Lucretius’ poem On the nature of things, or Pliny’s Natural History: these works attempt to provide a description of the physical world. The other approach provides an articulated educational project by means of the exposition of the liberal arts: the triuium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and the quadriuium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music).

Greek and the Greeks made a notable contribution to the last great burst of ancient Latin literature, that of the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD, in spite of the fact that the domains of Greek and Latin were in many ways clearly distinct and became rigidly so, at least for administrative purposes, with the division of the empire in 395. The greatest Roman historian of the age was Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek-speaker from Antioch; Claudian, born and educated in Egypt, migrated to Rome i:o make his career by writing Latin encomia; Macrobius drew copiously on Greek of various kinds and from various sources; Jerome, who had a close knowledge of Christian Greek writers, quotes words frequently in his criticism and exegesis. One of the most remarkable writers of this period is Ausonius, whose entire life as far as we know was spent in or near the cities of Bordeaux and Trier. He wrote four poems, albeit of the briefest, which are wholly in Greek, and another three in which lines of Greek and Latin alternate. In one of his letters Greek and Latin words, roots, and inflexions are mixed as perhaps never before, making what he calls a μϵ μiγ μ ϵ νoβ α ρ β α ρoν ωiδ η ν (‘a poem intermingled with barbarisms‘, by which he jokingly means Latin). Another letter, partly in Greek, seems to imply a broad knowledge of Greek literature. These and other writings of his cast an interesting light on the position of Greek language and literature in fourth century Gaul, and their place in the mind and affections of a leading scholar and poet.

This paper aims to provide a critical survey of classical Latin literature—with a few insights into slightly later (i.e. Augustan or early imperial) literature—as transmitted in ancient manuscripts dating prior to the third century, i.e. in fragmentary papyrus rolls (and less often codices) mostly coming from the Roman East and palaeographically dating to between the first century BC and the end of the second century AD. Spellings and orthography are the focus, albeit other significant linguistic (especially lexical) features are discussed when they can offer clues to a more complex analysis of classical Latin.

Aulus Gellius originated the modern use of ‘classical’ and ‘humanities’. His Attic Nights, so named because they began as the intellectual pastime of winter evenings spent in a villa outside Athens, are a mine of information on many aspects of antiquity and a repository of much early Latin literature that would otherwise be lost; he took a particular interest in questions of grammar and literary style. The whole work is interspersed with interesting personal observations and vignettes of second-century life that throw light on the Antonine world. This study, the most comprehensive of Gellius in any language, examines his life, his circle of acquaintances, his style, his reading, his scholarly interests, and his place in literary tradition parentage; reference is made to his reception in later antiquity and beyond. It covers many subject areas such as language, literature, law, rhetoric, and medicine; it also examines Gellius's attitudes to women and the relation considered between the literary trends of Latin (the so-called archaizing movement) and Greek (Atticism) in the second century AD. The text, sense, and content of numerous individual passages are considered, and light shed on a wide range of problems in Greek as well as Latin authors.