The Poetics of Late Latin Literature

Abstract

Abstract The aesthetic changes in late Roman literature speak to the foundations of modern Western culture. The dawn of a modern way of being in the world, one that most Europeans and Americans would recognize as closely ancestral to their own, is to be found, not in the distant antiquity of Greece nor in the golden age of a Roman Empire that spanned the Mediterranean, but more fundamentally in the original and problematic fusion of Graeco-Roman culture with a new and unexpected foreign element—the arrival of Christianity as an exclusive state religion. For a host of reasons, traditionalist scholarship has failed to give a full and positive account of the formal, aesthetic, and religious transformations of ancient poetics in Late Antiquity. This book attempts to capture the excitement and vibrancy of the living ancient tradition reinventing itself in a new context in the hands of a series of great Latin writers mainly from the fourth and fifth centuries ad. A number of the most distinguished expert voices in later Latin poetry, as well as some of the most promising new scholars, have been specially commissioned to write original material for this volume.

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