‘Visual Epitome in Late Antique Art’ in M. Formisano and P. Sacchi (eds.) Epitomic Writing in Late Antiquity and Beyond: Forms of Unabridged Writing, London (Bloomsbury), 2023, 202-229 (original) (raw)
Classical Historiographers' Use of Inscribed Epigram
Scripta Antiqua: Les historiens grecs et romains: entre sources et modèles, edd. O. Devillers & B. B. Sebastiani, 2018
Presented at the Classical Association Annual Conference in April 2015 (and with a fuller version published in Scripta Antiqua: Les historiens grecs et romains: entre sources et modèles, edd. O. Devillers & B. B. Sebastiani) this paper examines how historiographers from Herodotus to Theopompos use epigram in their histories. While some writers pay attention to the epigram's material context, this becomes increasingly less common in the late fourth century BCE. This paper suggests that the rise of collections in Lycurgan Athens made it easier for historiographers to use epigram in their histories while simultaneously removing epigram from its material context. This move towards compilation and collection should be seen in light of wider cultural phenomena such as the Lycurgan state texts of tragedy and the activities of Aristotle and his school.
More Publicity through Very Short Books (Preprint). Epitomes in Late Antiquity and the Renaissance 1
J. Muñoz Morcillo / C.Y. Robertson-von Trotha (eds.) Genealogy of Popular Science. From Ancient Ecphrasis to Virtual Reality, Bielefeld , 2020
From around 360 to 410 AD, most published works on Latin history were epitomes, i.e., summaries that condensed the preceding longer works to 10-30% of their original length (often shorter than 100 pages by modern-day page count). One of the main aims of epitomes was to provide new men in politics and administration with necessary basic knowledge of Roman history; sometimes epitomes were also 'misused' by Christian authors for apologetic aims. As such, they had quite a broad, heterogeneous public. Renaissance epitomes (presented here in a selection from 15th-century Italy) didn't serve any particular political goals. They were written by humanists for learned readers who were often looking for intellectual entertainment-as opposed to the practical and easy-to-read epitomes of late antiquity, which were aimed at inerudite readers. The change in media from manuscripts to printed books increased the impact and circulation of late antique epitomes, but did not have the same positive effect for Renaissance epitomes.
This chapter introduces the role of images, their power, and agency. Starting with the anthropological and powerful character of images, focus shifts to a historical specification of potential uses of images. As a case study, discussion refers to the transition from Hellenistic to early imperial Italy, a period when the frequency of images massively increased, and new media, materials, and production techniques came into play. This entailed not only the creation of new visual formulas and styles but also new image contexts and perceptual situations. Examination of this historical process allows for a reflection on the agents involved, as well as their specific interests and forms of (inter-)action. This, in turn, will allow for some insights into the historically specific interests invested in images, as well as some general reflections on the role of images.
The First Hellenistic Epigrams at ROME1
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 1988
How Hellenistic epigram arrived in Rome has been obscured of late by negligence. Yet the situation seemed clear enough early in this century; Friedrich Leo could write that Greek elegiac couplets were represented by the Satumian verses inscribed in the sepulcher of the Scipios: Leo's Geschichte der riimischen Literatur (1913) states that the elogia in Latin derive from the Greek usage of funerary epigram.2 Yet Leo's perception has been neglected recently. Authoritative studies of the Scipionic sepulcher from the standpoints of archaeology, topography and epigraphy all confuse the status of the e10gia.~ Nor has archaeology been more forgetful than some contemporary philology. Leo's point that the Scipionic satumians represent Greek form and function, in short, the Greek genre of epigram, does not figure, for example, in a recent attempt to reconstruct the history of epigram in republican Rome: an attempt that neglects the epigraphic record of the genre and even goes so far as to propound the existence of a purely native Roman tradition in epigram," in spite of the Greek origin and cultural implication of the very name, not to mention the problematic status of the idea of the 'purely native' at Rome, which Eduard Wolfflin, for example, had exposed as a scholarly and cultural myth.5 For the archaeologists, then, whose reinterpretation of the monument made my own studies possible, I have offered elsewhere a reminder that the elogia constitute a literary product that is a deliberate transplant of Greek genre into the Roman situation.'j At the same time, perplexed by the notion of 'native Roman tradition', I have argued in yet another study that the epigrams of republican Rome embraced a rather wide diversity of stylistic features, which they shared with Hellenistic Greek epigram, so that one might most accurately speak of a Hellenistic-Roman Vulgate, certainly not a purely native traditi~n.~ What remains then for the present is more detailed study of genre and style in the Scipionic elogia themselves, to reaffirm their linkage with Hellenistic epigram. Concerning the problem of genre at Rome, the remarks by Oswyn Murray in a recent Journal of Roman Studies provide an apt reminder and theoretical perspective: Parts of the following material were presented orally at the American Philological Association, the Brown University Classics Department, the Liverpool Latin Seminar and the summer school of the American Academy in Rome. In discussion at Liverpool, Otto Skutsch played an active and extremely helpful role. He also offered characteristically precise observations and corrections to a subsequent draft, though responsibility for the final version is my own. Bruno Gentili shared materials from his forthcoming collection of archaic Latin texts, and Nevio Zorzetti gave scholarly friendship in Rome and Trieste. * Leo, 1913, 45: 'das Grabgedicht aus dem griechischen Gebrauch aufgenommen ... in satumischen Versen an Stelle des elegischen griechischen Masses.' See articles cited by Van Sickle, AJP 108 (1987), 41ff. Ross, 1969, S.V. Pre-neoteric epigram. On p.13 we read that, apart from Aedituus, Licinus and Catulus, 'Our only other examples of pre-neoteric epigrams (CIL 4, 4966-73 [sc. the grafitti of Tiburtinus at Pompeii]) have been virtually ignored.' Neither the epigrams of Lucilius nor actual verse inscriptions get taken into account.
Interlitteraria, 2014
After the flowering of the epigram in Ancient Greece and Rome, greater attention to this genre was paid at the beginning of the Renaissance, and the epoch of the Baroque (the 17-18 th centuries) could be called one of the brightest periods of epigram revival and prosperity in all Europe. In the 16-18 th centuries literary theorists in their works discussed the place of the epigram in the hierarchy of literary genres, determined their functions, form, defined the possibilities of content. By suggesting that the form of the epigram had not been settled in Antiquity, theorists gave most attention to the content of the epigram and explained how, when in imitating the most famous ancient authors, the epigram could be given Christian features. The article, using comparative methods, will analyze how epigrams of Martial were imitated by the poet of the 17 th century Grand Duchy of Lithuania M. C. Sarbievius.