Late Antique Poetry Research Articles

Genesis in Late Antique Poetry, edited by Andrew Faulkner, Cillian O’Hogan, and Jeffrey Wickes

Genesis in Late Antique Poetry, edited by Andrew Faulkner, Cillian O’Hogan, and Jeffrey Wickes

THEGETTY HEXAMETERSAND GREEK TRAGEDY

The present article aims to show that several passages of Greek tragedy make use of language present in theGetty Hexameters, especially in contexts where incantations and protection of the city are mentioned. TheGetty Hexameterswere written on a lead tablet at the end of the fifth century BC in Sicily (Selinus or, more likely, Himera). The article argues that the composition of the text predates the lead tablet by several decades (section 2). It focuses on similarities in structure and language that involve Soph. fr. 535 (section 4), Aeschylus’Oresteia(section 5), Sophocles’Oedipus Tyrannus(section 6) and Euripides’Hecuba(section 8). It also suggests that Plato (section 7) and late antique poetry and prose (section 9) reuse some of the linguistic elements of the incantatory tradition of theGetty Hexameters.

Spectators and Spectacle in Quintus’ Posthomerica

Abstract Quintus’ literary reputation is on the rise, in the wake of a general reappreciation of late antique literature. In my article I discuss Quintus’ use of embedded focalization: when we look at events through the eyes of one of the characters. Quintus uses this narrative device both in the same way as Homer, but also in original new ways. One such new way is the serial use of embedded focalization at the moment of arrival of a champion. The ample use of embedded focalization can be added to the list of stylistic features which contribute to the well-known visual aesthetics of late antique poetry, such as ekphrasis, miniaturization, enumeration, and the juxtaposition of episodic scenes. But I also argue that Quintus through the ubiquitous presence of spectators frames the action of his story as a spectacle, a race or gladiatorial show, which gods and characters and hence his narratees, watch as if sitting in an amphitheatre or circus.

Polemical poetry in Late Antiquity: the rise of a eunuch consul in Book 1 of Claudian’s In Eutropium

ABSTRACT: The article examines Claudian’s use of Stoic and Epicurean ideas to mount a vitriolic attack against Eutropius, the eunuch consul serving under the Eastern emperor Arcadius. Employed by Stilicho, the pre-eminent military commander of the Western emperor Honorius, Claudian, in Book 1 of the In Eutropium , synthesizes Stoic and Epicurean tropes about bodily afflictions that reveal one’s moral character. Claiming that Eutropius, a eunuch who had spent many years as a slave, is a monstrous proof of an offence committed against nature/God, Claudian’s polemic plays on the fears of his largely Christian audience about an imminent divine punishment, which the split of the Empire between Theodosius’ sons confirms.

The Hebrew epithalamium in late antiquity: new evidence from the Cairo Genizah and beyond

Several anonymous Hebrew epithalamia (wedding poems), preserved in manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah, can be dated, in view of their specific literary characteristics, to Byzantine (and early Muslim) Eretz Israel (Palestine): noteworthy evidence of the flourishing of non-liturgical Hebrew poetry in late antiquity. The article demonstrates and analyses these poems’ affinities to Jewish Palestinian Aramaic epithalamia, in terms of subject matter and rhetoric, as well as their resemblance to classical Hebrew piyyut, in terms of language and style. They are also examined against the background of the performance of Hebrew wedding songs as reflected in Talmudic sources, and it is suggested that the influence of such non-liturgical epithalamia can be detected in the earliest known piyyut composition which marks the occasion of marriage, a Qedushta by El’azar birabi Qillir (Kalir). Some comparable characteristics of these non-liturgical Hebrew wedding poems and the epithalamium genre in Greco-Roman late antiquity are also considered. The article includes critical editions and English translations of two Hebrew epithalamia from the Cairo Genizah.

Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry by Philip Hardie

348 PHOENIX Recent Nonnian scholarship emphasises the debt of late antique poetry to Latin literature.3 Similarly, Montiglio includes Musaeus’ Latin models in her discussion. The author, wisely perhaps, does not draw her uninitiated reader into the very thorny (for classicists at least) issue of the poem’s characterisation as an epyllion, with which she deals just briefly (4). Montiglio stresses the poem’s sympathetic description of the two lovers, argues against it being a Christian Neoplatonic allegory,4 and downplays Musaeus’ alleged Christianity: “he could have been a Christian, but this cannot be proven,” “the new religion apparently did not leave any imprint on the poem of M” (4). She also gives a wonderful glimpse into Hero’s body language (24). The overall impression from reading Montiglio’s commentary is that it is in line with the general humanist approach to the poem as a “tragic love story.” By downplaying, however, the Christian environment in which the poem circulated, irrespective of its author’s actual religious inclination, the analysis remains focused more on the poem’s literary themes and less on its late antique contextualization. Although Montiglio highlights the poet’s debt to Nonnus, notes his adoption of the late antique themes of light and darkness (18), and even detects a (rather implausible in my view) centonic use of Homer at line 4 (69), these references are mainly stylistic. The analysis favors Ovidian and Hellenistic intertextuality at the expense of Christian models, as for instance the allusion at line 139 (86) to Luke 11:27 (“most blessed the womb that brought you forth”). However, given the current explosion of Nonnian studies and the scholarly focus on classicizing biblical poetry in late antiquity, the Christian lens might have offered a further glimpse into the poem’s Sitz im Leben. For example, the discussion of Hero’s virginity may have been perceived differently by a Christian audience; the violent intoxication, bondage, and rape of the tecnophagus Nonnian Aura (whom Montiglio compares with Hero at 22) is evocative of the late antique taste for gore, androgynous bodies, and extreme sexual violence that hardly has its equivalent in this poem, but which may serve as a foil against which this love story can be read. Certainly, no single edition can cover all themes, but the above observations are indicative of the disciplinary fragmentation between classical and Christian literary production and may highlight further research pathways. Overall, the present edition is a welcome and useful contribution to the study of Musaeus that, together with the two recent monographs on its reception, will further the field. Cambridge Anna Lefteratou Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry. By Philip Hardie. Berkeley, California: University of California Press (Sather Classical Lectures 74). 2019. Pp. viii, 293. In this volume, based upon his six Sather lectures delivered at Berkeley in 2016, Philip Hardie turns his critical gaze to the Latin poetry of late antiquity, particularly that of 3 For example, K. Carvounis and S. Papaioannou, “Nonnus’ Dionysiaca and the Latin Tradition: The Episode of Ampelus,” in F. Doroszewski and K. Jaz̄dz̄ewska (eds.), Nonnus of Panopolis in Context 3: Old Questions and New Perspectives (Leiden 2020) 119–138. 4 Argued by Gelzer in Trypanis et al. (see above, n. 1) 316–322. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 349 the so-called Theodosian renaissance in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. In eight thematically organized chapters he explores the reception of Latin literature of the late republic and early empire in late antique Latin authors, both Christian and pagan: “Farewells and Returns—Ausonius and Paulinus of Nola” (Chapter One); “Virgilian Plots—Public Ideologies and Private Journeys” (Chapter Two); “Cosmos—Classical and Christian Universes” (Chapter Three); “Concord and Discord: Concordia Discors” (Chapter Four); “Innovations of Late Antiquity: Novelty and Renouatio” (Chapter Five); “Paradox , Mirabilia, Miracles” (Chapter Six); “Allegory” (Chapter Seven); “Mosaics and Intertextuality ” (Chapter Eight). Binding together and interweaving these chapters is a nuanced re-evaluation of the attempts to define a characteristic aesthetic or poetics of late antique Latin poetry (as distinct from that of earlier Latin poetry) that lie at the heart of much of the recent and bourgeoning scholarship on late antique poetry.1 Hardie also...

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature by Rebecca Davis

Religion & Literature 198 in thematic terms that the book hangs together as a whole. As for intertextuality and influence, the first reason, Pollmann deals with an impressive range of authors and issues. As is often the case in studies of late antique poetry, the focus is Roman rather than Greek (the only exception is the aforementioned chapter on Euripides and the Christus patiens). But within the ranks of late Latin writers, Pollman discusses a wide variety, from the beginnings of late Latin and early Christian poetry down into the Middle Ages, including Walafrid Strabo and Sigebert of Gembloux. She has divided the chapters into three major sections: “The Poetics of Authority in Early Christian Poetry”; “Christian Authority and Poetic Succession”; and “Poetic Authority in Rivalling Cultural and Theological Discourses.” I will focus here on two of the several key themes that emerge throughout the essays. First, in order to understand the social function of late Latin poetry, and particularly Christian Latin poetry, it is essential to grasp that it is poetry with a cultural agenda; the poet—whether Proba or Prudentius, Arator or Avitus—wants you, the reader, to do something. That is, the poems are intended to force a choice on the reader, to interrogate and bring about to a decision. Neutrality in the face of the text’s demands is foreclosed before the text has even begun. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad” (Matthew 12:30). This is the impulse that informs Christian poetry. What is the reader to do? He is to accept Christianity and reform his life. It is a theme that has been explored in other recent works as well, such as Marc Mastrangelo’s The Roman Self in Late Anquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul (2008). The production of Christian poetry, then, is an act consisting of the aggrandizement of authority. Scripture preeminently, and the lives of the saints secondarily, are the authorities that explicitly underwrite the poets’ claims. Second, however, and relatedly, the Christian poet has to deal with a different canon as well: the canon of pagan authors. The best mode of posture toward the pagan past was, throughout late antiquity, in the process of constant renegotiation by Christian writers. Augustine resolved the question most famously through his notion of “spoiling the Egyptians” in Book 2 of De doctrina christiana, but he was neither the first nor the last to make an attempt, nor is his model without rivals. Pollmann treats various possibilities in chapters on Cassiodorus and Venantius Fortunatus and on the cento of Proba. Of Cassiodorus (a prose author, of course), Pollmann argues convincingly for his attempt to “Christianize pagan erudition” (77) through a “manipulative engagement of canonical...authorities,” in which he uses Augustine selectively to forge his own (different) program, “thus BOOK REVIEWS 199 camouflaging a de facto discontinuity by pretending continuity” (97-98). Proba, on the other hand, rewrites in a different way, claiming to find a hidden message of Christian salvation that was locked in the Vergilian poems all along, awaiting only the hand that could draw them out (112); this is set in contrast to Ausonius’ saucy use of the same authority in the Cento nuptialis. On both scores, Christian writers have to find a way to deal with their own “secondariness,” with writing what Gerard Genette (to whom Pollmann refers) calls “literature in the second degree” under the stern stare of their literary ancestors who, in the words of W. H. Auden, “challenge, warn and witness.” Pollman deals with the phenomenon admirably, whether the source text in view is the Bible, a prose Vita of a saint, or a poetic forebear. One further type not covered, but meriting further research in the future, is how to approach authors who transform their own texts, giving different versions in verse and prose; significant here is Sedulius’s foray into the opus geminatum: the Carmen paschale (in verse) and Opus paschale (in prose). But one cannot cover everything, and what Pollmann covers she covers thoroughly. We live in the best time for reading late Latin poetry...

THE POETICS OF LATER GREEK ECPHRASIS: CHRISTODORUS COPTUS, THEPALATINE ANTHOLOGYAND THEPERIOCHAEOF NONNUS’DIONYSIACA

There is increasing interest in what might be thought ‘special’ about late antique poetry. Two volumes of recent years have focused on Latin poetry of this time,Classics Renewed: Reception and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquityedited by Scott McGill and Joseph Pucci (2016) as well asThe Poetics of Late Latin Literatureedited by Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato (2017), while it has become increasingly acceptable to remark on late antiquity as a cultural period in its own right, rather than a point of transition between high antiquity and the middle ages. Greek poetry of late antiquity has yet to receive the level of attention offered to Latin literature of this time, and so it is to help answer the question of what may be thought special about late antique Greek poetry that I here discuss the poetics of later Greek ecphrasis.

The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari

Reviewed by: The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari Ian Fielding The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity. Aaron Pelttari Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 190. ISBN 978–0-8014–5276–5. These are exciting times to be reading late Latin poetry. Although it is a field that—in Anglophone scholarship, at least—has not always attracted the same level of attention as other areas of late antique studies, the last ten years have seen the publication of a number of important monographs on individual poets such as Prudentius, Claudian, and Venantius Fortunatus. In scope and methodology, however, Aaron Pelttari’s book is perhaps the most ambitious study of late antique Latin poetry since Roberts’s The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, 1989). Pelttari continues Roberts’s project of outlining the aesthetic trends that are characteristic of poetry in this period, and The Space That Remains offers an indication of how approaches to late antique poetics have developed in the generation after Roberts’s seminal work. Roberts was influenced by the Rezeptionästhetik of Jauss, and his attempts to explain late Latin poetry in terms of its own historical “horizon of expectations” can be seen as an early exercise in the hermeneutics of reception, which were to become increasingly prominent in the interpretation of Latin literature during the 1990s. Drawing on these ideas, Pelttari shows that late antique authors had their own theories of reception, and that the realization of meaning by the reader is a key theme of many late Latin texts. The Space That Remains has four chapters, any one of which might have [End Page 292] been expanded into a monograph—or even, into several monographs—by a less inquisitive scholar than Pelttari. Although he takes his main examples from the poems of Ausonius, Prudentius, and Claudian, it is worth pointing out that his survey includes a range of other prose and verse authors from the fourth and early fifth centuries. In the first chapter, for instance, he provides an introduction to late antique interpretive practices by comparing the comments of Jerome and Augustine on the exegesis of Scripture to those of Macrobius on the exegesis of Virgil and Cicero. These are different spheres of activity, as Pelttari is careful to observe (43), and the comparison could have been reinforced with more detailed examination of the attitudes of Jerome and Augustine to the reading of Latin poetry. It is made clear nonetheless that these Christian writers held similar ideals to the pagan Macrobius of the “author-as-reader” (17) and of “writing as an act of reception” (32)—ideals that, Pelttari suggests, attest to a widespread view of reading as a “strong and influential act” (43) in Late Antiquity. Pelttari’s interest in exegesis extends beyond late antiquity to the critical theory of the twentieth century. In his third chapter, he applies Umberto Eco’s category of opera aperta, works of art open to multiple interpretations, to late antique poems that display distinct “layers” of meaning: Optatianus Porfyrius’ figural poetry; Prudentius’ allegorical Psychomachia; and the Virgilian centos composed by Proba and Ausonius, among others. The second chapter treats the prefaces of Claudian, Prudentius, and Ausonius as “paratexts,” adopting Genette’s designation for the peripheral features that present a text to its reader (titles, indices, etc.). This willingness to take new approaches to late Latin poetry is refreshing, although the tendency to theoretical abstraction need not exclude consideration of the “social and material realities of reading,” which Pelttari leaves to one side after p. 8. The concept of the “paratext,” in particular, draws attention to the materiality of poetic texts. Pelttari stresses in his discussion that Augustan poets like Virgil, Horace, and Propertius avoided prefaces (49, 72), but without observing that their works do include sphragides, which as Peirano has now demonstrated (in L. Jansen [ed.], The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers [Cambridge, 2014], 224–42), can also be seen as “paratexts” by ‘sealing’ a roll of papyrus and which perform similar functions to Pelttari’s late antique prefaces. In this case, it would be worthwhile to reflect on the...

The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari (review)

Reviewed by: The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari James Uden Aaron Pelttari. The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 190. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5276-5. “The space that remains,” according to Aaron Pelttari’s adventurous new book, is the openness that characterizes late antique Latin literature, its invitation for the audience to participate in the production of meaning. In direct contrast to the outmoded view of later Latin literature dominated by the slavish repetition of earlier tropes, Pelttari argues that the literature of the fourth century consistently celebrates presence–the presence of the reader, who is called upon to [End Page 581] play a vital, vibrant role in activating the meaning of the text. The Space That Remains shows us an era enamored not with the wit of individual poet geniuses, but rather with the power of readers to reinterpret and rearrange the building blocks of the Latin literary tradition. This is an exciting book. The first three chapters examine three distinct aspects of fourth-century literary culture. The first discusses commentaries on Christian and pagan texts by Jerome, Augustine, Macrobius, and Servius. Pelttari argues that these commentators emphasize the multiple layers of meaning in their source texts in order to create “the need for vigorous interpretation” by fourth-century readers. The second chapter focuses on the ways in which prefaces to the poems of Claudian, Prudentius, and Ausonius explicitly present the text not as a timeless artifact, but as grounded within a particular context, constructed according to certain parameters, and awaiting (and requiring) interpretation. The third chapter examines a series of fourth-century poems that, Pelttari argues, remain “incomplete” without readers’ participation: the mind-bendingly complex figural poetry of Optatian, the allegorical Psychomachia of Prudentius, and the centos, stitched together out of “patchwork” quotations of Virgilian verse. For Pelttari, far from illustrating the degeneracy (vel sim.) of late antique taste, these texts epitomize the period’s central literary preoccupation: exploring the power of the reader to construct new meaning from preexisting textual components. This is not a long book, and Pelttari moves quickly. There is sometimes a sense that he is surveying rather than closely analyzing his texts, but the fact that he has synthesized such a broad array of evidence into a coherent argument is impressive indeed. Far bolder is the book’s fourth and final chapter, which offers a distinctive late antique challenge to theories of allusion dominant in Latin literary studies since the 1990s. “Insofar as they resist the movement toward intertextuality,” Pelttari writes (160), late antique allusions “work in ways that are counter to received notions of the dynamics of appropriation in Latin poetry” (note the author’s own allusion to the subtitle of Stephen Hinds’s agenda-setting Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry [Cambridge 1998], an important interlocutor for this chapter’s discussion). Pelttari outlines different types of idiosyncratically postclassical forms of allusion: the “nonreferential allusion,” in which the words of the allusion have become separable from their source text and the reader is not challenged to remember its original context; “juxtaposed allusions,” in which disconnected fragments of classical texts are juxtaposed with one another; and the “apposed allusion,” which draws attention to its own lack of fit within its new poetic surroundings. Late antique forms like the cento, constructed entirely out of “micro-allusions,” seem to have reached a sort of intertextual overload. They surely call for a different approach, and yet Pelttari’s category of “nonreferential allusion” sits uneasily with the strong emphasis elsewhere in the book on the reader’s power to make meaning. Even the small textual patches in the cento form were said in chapter 3 to open the potential of referring back to their source text if the reader chooses to “follow that path” and interpret them (101). In this chapter and scattered throughout the book, Pelttari also broaches big questions about “classicism” and “postclassicism,” aesthetic categories intriguingly unmoored from chronology. These ideas perhaps needed to be articulated in a clearer and more unified way. Nonetheless, if...

The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari (review)

The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari (review)

The Space that Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari

194 PHOENIX et celles qui le consulteront uniquement pour savoir s’il existe une source fragmentaire pour l’événement qu’ils recherchent. Sans être absolument nécessaire, l’organisation par ordre alphabétique et numérique des index énumérant les sujets couverts par chacun des auteurs aurait tout aussi bien fait l’affaire. De toute évidence, FRHist va devenir l’ouvrage de référence par excellence en matière de sources de fragments historiques romains et tous ceux qui, de près ou de loin, utiliseront cet ouvrage en conviendront. Le choix du système d’organisation et de numérotation de Jacoby comme méthode d’utilisation et de référencement des sources fragmentaires constitue en soi une contribution discrète, certes, mais tout aussi importante. À plusieurs égards, FRHist parvient à synthétiser les travaux des ouvrages qui le précèdent tout en réunissant l’examen linguistique de Chassignet et l’analyse historique de Beck et Walter en une même collection. Ce faisant, FRHist va pourtant bien au-delà de ces ouvrages, puisqu’il inclut des testimonia et tente aussi de retravailler, réorganiser et ajouter au contenu des travaux de Peter. Bien que les travaux de Peter, Chassignet et ceux de Beck et Walter demeurent d’une importance considérable, l’exhaustivité du FRHist à elle seule, ajoutée au remaniement en profondeur des fragments présentés, fera de ce livre un modèle du genre et l’ouvrage de référence pour toute recherche à venir. Tout comme Jacoby, la collection The Fragments of the Roman Historians de Cornell a un bel avenir ; les érudits de demain pourront continuer d’ajouter à son œuvre, mais il est fort probable que cette réalisation monumentale ne soit jamais remplacée ni surpassée. McGill University John Serrati The Space that Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity. By Aaron Pelttari. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology). 2014. Pp. xi, 190. Aaron Pelttari has written a short but very ambitious book. His stated aim (5) is to mark one of the major turns in the history of Latin literature, what he describes as “the transformation of Latin poetry within the fourth century.” In doing so, he writes with admirable clarity, shows sound knowledge of the central research questions and the relevant bibliography, and constructs a carefully plotted argument. This is a book that all those interested in “later” Latin poetry will have to read with care. Having been educated in how to read late antique poetry by M. Roberts in his influential The Jeweled Style (Ithaca 1989), we still need more literary monographs of a similar kind. Recently, C. Ware has transformed our appreciation of Claudian and his intertextuality (Claudian and the Roman Epic Tradition [Cambridge 2012]), and now Pelttari offers us a rich volume that should help stimulate further research. Pelttari’s monograph contains an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion, followed by a list of works cited, a general index, and an index of passages cited. The volume is very elegantly produced. Central to Pelttari’s approach is an attempt to focus on the reader and the act of reading. He argues that in the fourth century c.e. a new relationship between author, text, and reader comes into being. While admitting that there are also strong elements of continuity with earlier periods, Pelttari believes that poets like Claudian, Ausonius, and Prudentius present their work in new ways, setting it up more explicitly than ever before as being in need of interpretation by active readers, BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 195 to such an extent that the structuring presence of the reader is central to the construction of authorial identity. This is a book about “the central importance of the reader within the textual world of late antiquity” (2), as Pelttari sets out to “describe a set of literary techniques and poetic forms that construct the reader’s involvement in the text” (4). In order to show what he means, Pelttari begins with Jerome and Augustine: as a commentator on the Bible the former is presented as...

The Space that Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari (review)

The Space that Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity by Aaron Pelttari (review)

Bakgrunden till Kellgrens ”Öfver Propertii Buste”

The Background to Kellgren’s ”On a bust of Propertius”. This article examines the Swedish eighteenth-century poet Johan Henric Kellgren’s widely celebrated epigram “On a bust of Propertius” (“Öfver Propertii Buste eller Porträt”), published posthumously. An attractive but fanciful story about the poem as Kellgren’s autobiographical reflection and personal farewell on his deathbed has triggered an unwillingness among scholars to explore what the writer himself declares: that the piece is a translation of the epigram In statuam Propertii by the virtually unknown Italian Renaissance poet Guido Postumo Silvestri of Pesaro. The first section of the article surveys the intertextual field of Postumo’s poem and analyses its fusion of common tropes and motifs in the Greco-Roman and Neo-Latin ekphrastic epigram traditions. The second section traces the subsequent textual history of Postumo’s poem and the changes it underwent in reprints as well as in the eighteenth-century Danish philologist Frederik Plum’s translation into his native language. The third and final section focuses on Kellgren’s interpretation of the Danish text. It was through a process in several steps of reproductions and translations that the Neo-Latin creation was strained of its manierism, mythological references and allusions to late antique poetry, producing this pathos-driven swansong.

Problemi colometrici negli anapesti senecani e sense-correspondence. L’esempio di Thyestes

The purpose of this paper is to point out the unsolved problem of the anapaestic monodies’ unsecure colometry in Seneca’s tragedies as well as expose the so called sense-correspondence principle to help scholars propose a metrical subdivision of lines closer to the original one. In the first part of the paper I explain the difficulties about colometry that concern the division of trimeters into dimeters and monometers. I then outline a brief status quaestionis about this matter and the attempts at solving it. Proposals by Richter, Zweirlein and Fitch are examined, their methods and criteria analysed in detail in the second paragraph. In the third I propose an analysis of three passages of Thyestes 938-956 using Fitch’s criteria so as every aspect of the text, including metrical or stylistic characteristics, is more respected than in Zwierlein’s text. I then show how sense-correspondence is used to analyse a text and help understand the employment and meaning of the anapaestic metre to express a conflict or psychological dilemma such as in the Thyestes. Lastly, I suggest new areas of possible research pertaining to poetry using this principle, as it also respected in Ovid’s elegiac distiches and late antique poetry. A detailed metrical analysis of Zwierlein’s and Fitch’s texts is supplied in the appendix.

La aristocracia galorromana ante las migraciones bárbaras del siglo V: la invención del burgundio

La presente comunicación se propone elucidar el papel de la poesía tardoantigua en la construcción social del “otro” bárbaro, esencial en la crisis identitaria del bajo Imperio Romano. Nos centraremos para ello en el cáustico carmen 12 de Sidonio Apolinar (430/431-489 d. C.), más comúnmente conocido como la “sátira de los Burgundios”.Esta pieza compuesta en torno al año 461 denuncia en clave de humor la extrema precariedad que atravesaba la maltratada capital lionesa ante la presencia masiva en sus calles y plazas de refugiados burgundios, que habían pasado de la noche a la mañana a enseñorearse de la colapsada ciudad galorromana, imponiendo a cada paso sus “incívicos” usos y costumbres. El poema –de una amarga comicidad– nos revela la frustración de un aristócrata nostálgico, que –ansioso por preservar el legado cultural del mundo romano– debe afrontar los cambios que necesariamente comporta la presencia de ese gran “otro” en el horizonte del Imperio y confesar, en último término, la inviabilidad de su proyecto, la imposibilidad de la poesía.Partiendo del evidente sesgo ideológico de este prisma literario, intentaremos reconstruir la historia del colectivo humano de los burgundios, uno de los más pujantes y creativos del panorama protogermánico.

Literariness and Levels of Style in Epigraphical Poetry of Late Antiquity

Nowadays, scholars usually speak of a ‘renaissance’ of poetry in the Greek literature of late antiquity, underlining at the same time the new relevance of poetic communication in late antique society and the renewal of our interest in this not so well-known production of late Greek literature. Renaissance and related terms are, of course, effective ways to describe the flowering of Greek poetry from the fourth to sixth centuries CE, so long as this does not undervalue the importance of continuity (which is not the same as tradition). Even the most significant innovation in late antique Greek poetry, namely the so-called ‘Nonnian manner’ or ‘modern style’, stems from a longtime sedimentation and perfectioning of linguistic and stylistic features which can be traced back to the Hellenistic age. Albert Wifstrand, in his seminal book of 1933, already pointed to this major fact, which Mary Whitby has systematically dealt with in an important article of 1994. Moreover, recent studies demonstrate that for a proper understanding of late antique poetry one must take into account Christian poetic production as well, which stands four-square within the traditions of Greek literature (in spite of the fact that classical = pagan is an equation which dies hard for some classicists). In the present paper both pagan and Christian epigrams will be considered to equally represent the aesthetics of late antiquity (or estetica antico-bizantina, to use Averincev's terminology).

Un distique vénatoire tardo-antique. À propos d'une inscription latine sur une lance d'apparat de la nécropole mérovingienne de Cutry

During the excavations carried out in the Merovingian necropolis of Cutry (Meurthe-et-Moselle), the archaeologists brought to light a male burial dating from the second half of the 6th century containing an exceptional object: a prestigious spear, datable – by analogy with some other weapons of the same type – of the 5th century. On its blade there is a Latin inscription which so far has not been deciphered. In my article I propose the following reading of this text: HAEC INT[E]R V[ASTAS] STRINGAT VENABVLA SI[L]VAS QVI GAUDET RABID[IS] OBUIU[S I]RE FERIS “Let draw this spear in vast forests Who enjoys to go against the wild animals”. If we suppose that the distich was not copied from an older spear and it was written specifically for the weapon found in the necropolis of Cutry, we cannot but be struck by its correct versification and the construction of the verses which evokes the poetry of Augustean period. The fine workmanship of the spear points unambiguously towards the Gallo-Roman aristocracy whose literary taste is well-known to us owing to the writings of Ausonius, Rutilius Namatianus and Sidonius Apollinaris. However, a comparison between the distich and their works does not deliver obvious analogies. Therefore, the text restored above appears to be a phenomenon: its writing on a prestigious hunting weapon, its impeccable versification, its light form, its Ovidian construction and, finally, its assonances which evoke the medieval léonins – all this make it an exceptional epigram which enriches our knowledge on late antique poetry.

:Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century

Introduction 1. Classical Latin Women Poets 2. Epigraphy as a Source for Early Imperial Women's Verse 3. Women and Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity 4. Women Poets in Early Medieval Europe 5. Women and Latin Verse in the High Middle Ages 6. Italy: Renaissance Women Scholars 7. Women and Latin in Renaissance France 8. Women Latin Poets in Spain and Portugal 9. Women Latinists of the Renaissance in Northern and Central Europe 10. Women Latinists in Sixteenth-Century England 11. Italian Women Poets of the Sixteenth Century and After 12. French women Latinists in the 'Grand Siecle' 13. Anna Maria van Schurman and Other Women Scholars of Northern and Central Europe 14. Women and Latin in Early Modern England 15. The New World Bibliographies

All About Sarah: Questions of Gender in Yannai's Poems on Sarah's (and Abraham's) Barrenness

This article offers a reading of two Hebrew liturgical poems by Yannai, a sixth century C.E. poet, from the perspective of contemporary gender and literary studies. The poems vividly and elaborately retell the story of Sarah's (and Abraham's) barrenness and their wish to have a child. The unique nature of these compositions lies in their delicate treatment of gender roles as well as in their surprising portrayal of Sarah as an active and self-conscious agent. Yannai draws on rich exegetical tradition (biblical, patristic and rabbinic) regarding Sarah's infertility but offers his own insights and contributions. The article also comments on the relevance of Christian hymnography to the study of Jewish poetry in Late Antiquity and on feminist readings of poetic texts from this formative period.