Poetry on the Advance: The Emergence and Formation of a Poetic Culture in Roman Britain

Abstract

The way in which the Roman army, as a major factor contributing to relative mobility of individuals within the Roman Empire, may be thought of as a driver behind the diffusion and general dynamic of Roman poetry and song, has not sufficiently been explored. Similarly, regionalized approaches to poetry and song as a cultural practice, subject to local, ethnic, social, and cultural variation and change, have not yet been pursued in a research context in which Roman poetry has largely remained a domain of study in upper-class entertainment and intertextuality. Not only is the common approach at odds with a methodology that has long, and successfully, been adopted otherwise in historical and linguistic research: it also excludes the vast majority of surviving poems from the Roman world, the Carmina Latina Epigraphica, from consideration – a body of texts that provides us with information about a cultural practice that, subject to substantial regional variation, literary poets stylized and drove to its artistic extremes.

More from the Romano-British Poets? A Possible Metrical Inscription from East Farleigh, Kent

“…RIB II.5 2491.146 (i); Schumacher 2012, 185–91 no. 18 (b); Kruschwitz 2015, 36–7, 66. Part of a tegula in two conjoining pieces, 147 170 x 180 x 35 mm, found on the site of the praetorium in 1977 and 1978 in the backfill of the excavations of 1878–9.…”

“…RIB II.5 2491.146 (ii) Schumacher 2012, 185–91 no. 18 (a); Kruschwitz 2015, 36–7, 66. Part of a brick, 292 x 241 x 38 mm, found on the site of the praetorium.…”

“… 136 These texts have been a subject of recent scholarly interest, for example Asciutti 2010; Cugusi 2006; 2014; Kruschwitz 2015; Schumacher 2012.…”