Studi e testi tardoantichi

Since the end of the last century Ennodius has been the object of increasing interest among scholars of late antiquity. Developments in Ennodian criticism are also addressed in this volume that presents the results of more than twenty years of research on the relationship – always dialectical and not infrequently innovative – that Ennodius maintains as a poet with the Latin literary tradition both profane and Christian. The chapters of the book revisit – in English and in one case with substantial modifications – eight of the author’s previously published papers on Ennodius along with one unpublished contribution.

Areas that have been specifically investigated include the functions that he assigns to poetry compared to those he assigns to prose his original re-treatment of some literary genres and his thematic stylistic lexical and metric choices. The last chapter explores the literary influence exerted by Ennodius’ poetry on the text of his epitaph. The very fact that its unknown author – certainly a great admirer of the deceased – did his best to imitate his style is a significant testimony to the prestige that Ennodius enjoyed after his death in the diocese of Pavia of which he had been the bishop.

Ancient commentaries on poetry - due to their heteronomous nature their miscellaneous character and the fact that most of them are transmitted in abridged and anonymous form - are usually not considered ‘authorial’ texts in the same way as poems or literary prose are. On the other hand as didactic texts they rely on authority to convey their interpretation and they also often seem to have been perceived as products of authorial activity as paratexts references and pseudepigraphic attributions demonstrate.

The aim of this volume is to explore this tension and to examine commentaries and scholia on poetry in terms of authorship and ‘authoriality’. The contributions use several Latin and Greek corpora as case studies to shed light on how these texts were read how they display authorial activity themselves and how they fulfil their function as didactic works. They provide reflections on the relationship of author authorship and authority in ‘authorless’ traditions explore how authorial figures and authorial viewpoints emerge in an implicit manner in spite of the stratified nature of commentaries investigate the authorial roles adopted by commentators compilers and scribes and elucidate how commentators came to be perceived as authors in other exegetic traditions.

En devenant le principal support pédagogique des grammatici l’œuvre de Virgile a joué un rôle central dans la formation intellectuelle de la jeunesse lors de l’Antiquité romaine tardive y compris dans la formation rhétorique : les discours - principalement ceux de l’Énéide - ont fourni aux commentateurs du grand poète l’occasion d’expliquer des notions rhétoriques et d’analyser des exemples précis de situations oratoires. Les contributions du présent volume explorent les différentes facettes de cet art virgilien de la parole tel qu’il a été compris par les professionnels de la littérature et de l’éducation de l’Antiquité tardive.

This collection of essays focuses on a crucial aspect of late antique thought and literature that has hitherto largely been neglected: its self-reflexivity i.e. its unprecedented ability to make language and literature into its main and often its only subject matter. Adopting a variety of perspectives and methodologies the essays included in this volume approach the notion of self-reflexivity in two main ways. On the one hand (literature as a reflection of literature) it implies a self-conscious reflection of preceding literary models which are creatively mirrored in new but intrinsically 'derivative' works of art taking the form of remakes parodies homages commentaries retellings centos paraphrases allegorizations and more or less free 're-enactments'. On the other hand (literature as reflection on literature) the term also implies a self-questioning reflection on the literary work and the very concepts of language and literature thus referring to its own artificiality or contrivance while opening up all sorts of theoretical discussions of the mechanisms the conventions and even the relevance of linguistic and literary representation.

The 2000th anniversary of Ovid's death was celebrated in 2017 and Ovid in Late Antiquity aims to mark the occasion. This book embodies a specific approach to Ovid's oeuvre which is not analysed in and of itself but rather in its role as a wellspring of inspiration to which later authors would return time and again. Covering the work of a number of authors who found their way back to Ovid via different methodological pathways the research distilled in this book is geared towards exploring the ways in which the authors of late antquity interacted with the poet of the Metamorphoses and with his immense multifaceted output. The choice of this approach arose out of an awareness that the presence and influence of Ovid in late antiquity constitute aspects of the Ovidian legacy that would benefit from more in-depth exploration. The essays in this collection are intended to help bridge this gap.

313 ad is generally considered a “turning point” in religious and political Western history. The meeting of Constantine and Licinius in Milan and the subsequent “edict” not only gave Christians the right to assemble and practice their faith but opened the way to the Christianisation of Roman imperial structures and finally to the declaration of Christianity as the only religion allowed in the Roman Empire.

The papers collected in this volume tackle this complex historical phase from a number of perspectives (from Church history and theology to political and juridical history) following a strongly multidisciplinary approach. The chronological schope stretching from the decades preceding the meeting of 313 to the reign of Julian the Apostate sheds light on the cultural political and juridical premises of Constantine and Licinius’s decisions as well as the way those premises affected a number of aspects of everyday life within the Empire up to Julian's pagan “restoration” and afterward.

About the mid-Fifties of 5th century AD the Gallo-Roman aristocrat and gifted poet Sidonius Apollinaris composed an epithalamium to celebrate the marriage of his noble friends Ruricius and Hiberia. Sidonius did not know that in less than two decades he would become the bishop of Clermont-Ferrand nor could Ruricius imagine that he would die the bishop of Limoges. Clinging to their profane models mostly represented by the epithalamia written by Statius and Claudian the poem (carm. 11) and its preface (carm. 10) depict a world where the overwhelming presence of myth helps to keep reality aside and the skilled devices of a sophisticated poetry try to revive the formal perfection of Roman classics and their values.

This volume provides a general introduction a critical text with Italian translation a punctual commentary (in fact the first one) to the epithalamium and its preface and a summary in English; it shows the original contribution of Sidonius to the literary tradition of late Latin Epithalamia; it illustrates the techniques of the poet; it deals with the many exegetic problems presented by both poems and it proposes new solutions for some of them.