Classics Colloquium with Timothy Whitmarsh

The fifth century CE is arguably the era of classical antiquity from which we have the most surviving poetry. Why is this? What was it about this most theologically and morally decadent of pagan poetic forms that appealed to late antique Christians? This paper explores this question from the perspective of form (that most charged of modern literary-critical terms). At one level, Byzantine Greeks drew a sharp line between pagan poetic form and Christian content. But sharp lines never hold for long; it was in part the risky contagiousness of epic form that constituted its allure.