LATIN EPIC OF LATE ANTIQUITY
Organized by Michael Roberts, Wesleyan University

[The panel as described in the Call for Papers]
Late Antiquity saw the emergence of forms of expression and modes of representation that remained influential throughout the Middle Ages. In literature, classical and biblical models, in conjunction with new religious and secular cultural forms as well as the changed circumstances of literary production, gave rise to works that were both recognizably indebted to literary tradition yet also distinctive of their period. Nowhere is this truer than in the prestigious classical genre of epic. A range of sub-genres of hexameter narrative poetry develop: the biblical, hagiographical, and panegyrical epics, centos, mythological epics and "epyllia". Vergil is an important model, often imitated for language, but the poetics of the late Latin epic are far from Vergilian. Among Christian authors, allusion often implies a critical attitude to non-Christian predecessors, by importing a Christian interpretation into a classical text or by implying a world of contrasting values.

Under the influence of grammatical traditions of poetic explication, texts may become storehouses of learning, receptive to exegetical expansion or the multiple levels of meaning of allegory. Epideictic forms predominate as the building blocks of an extended narrative, especially the description and the set speech. In the course of the fourth to the sixth century, epic undergoes a range of permutations that raise many questions for the literary historian, literary critic, and literary theorist.

This session will address some of those questions with the intention of charting the transformations and continuities of epic in this important transitional period of Latin literary history and the problems of interpretation and evaluation such poetry poses. Papers are invited that focus on any of the Late Antique biblical epics or hexameter narratives (Juvencus, Prudentius, Arator, Dracontius, Avitus, etc.), or on the reception of these works in the Middle Ages and beyond.