Contributions to the History of the Latin Elegiac Distich

The elegiac distich was introduced in Rome by Quintus Ennius, in the first half of the 2nd century BC. It became the standard meter of epigram and elegy, its life extending over a very long period, from archaic Latinity to late antiquity (and beyond, to the Middle Ages and the early modern period). This volume provides scholars with a collection of (in good part previously unpublished) first-hand analyses of the elegiac distich, based on the scansion of nearly all Latin poetry in this meter, from Catullus to Venantius Fortunatus. As such, it reconstructs the evolution of the Latin elegiac distich in the first seven hundred years of its history, and it sheds new light on the metrical style of almost all Latin poets who composed verses in it during the period under consideration.