With the conversion to Christianity in the Theodosian age, the Roman aristocracy projected their class ideology and self-representation into the conception of religious sanctity and the vision of the Afterlife. On a literary level, this gives rise to an eschatological imagery in which the holy souls are the nobility and the ‘notables’ (proceres) of the eternal res publica, they constitute the ‘heavenly senate’ (caelestis curia) seated around the throne of God, and the martyrs of Christ are given the title of ‘consuls’. This paper aims to describe the development of such images in the Christian Latin poetry of the 4th-6th centuries AD.
Composed on imperial commission, the elegant verse epitaph for the racehorse Phosphorus is an outstanding example of Ausonius’ poetic memory and a sophisticated essay of his technique of allusion. The three main models that innervate the text – two epigrams by Martial and a passage from Nemesianus’ Cynegetica – are signalised through three distinct references or ‘quotations’ concentrated in the first line, which sums up the ‘intertextual project’ of the poem. The paper aims to describe this feature of the epigram in detail; the analysis is completed by a fresh attempt to correct the scribal error that affects the last line of the text in the unique manuscript.
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