POETS AND READERS IN SEVENTH-CENTURY ROME: POPE HONORIUS, LUCRETIUS, AND THE DOORS OF ST. PETER'S

Abstract

This essay offers several reasons for reconsidering seventh-century Rome's reputation as a literary dark age. It provides close readings of several epigrams inscribed in Roman churches during and soon after the papacy of Honorius I (625–38) as evidence for a revived literary scene in the city during these years. It also argues that the intertextual maneuvers deployed by these epigrams suggest, contrary to current opinion, that Lucretius's De rerum natura had Roman readers in the early seventh century. Lucretius's “popularity” in contemporary Visigothic Spain; the likelihood that Honorius's younger contemporary and acquaintance, Jonas of Bobbio, was familiar with Lucretius; and the eventual presence of a (lost) manuscript of the De rerum natura in the library of the Bobbio monastery are enlisted in order to set both early seventh-century Rome and the De rerum natura in wider historical context. In general, this essay encourages the re-evaluation of the place of epigraphic poetry in our histories of late Latin literature and literary culture.