Ricerc@Sapienza

Throughout the course of the Sasanian period, the region of Adiabene constantly played a strategic role thanks to its geographic location; at the same time, the literary evidence concerning Adiabene potentially offers a unique insight into the area, on its heterogeneous society and on the way the central administration coped with its particular circumstances. In the last decade a renewed interest in the frontier areas of Late-Antique Upper Mesopotamia has fostered the appearance of studies specifically devoted to this remarkable region

Presentation of the first results of the Fronteira Landscape Project, dedicated to Roman Landscape Archaeology in the Alto Alentejo. In January 2018, field work in the municipality of Fronteira resorted to non-invasive methods such as surface survey,

Some very fragmentary inscriptions from the Colosseum can give us, if carefully read, supplied and interpreted, interesting information not only about the building history of the Colosseum itself in the IVth century, but also about important buildings of Rome in Late Antiquity: the domus of the senatorial family of the Artorii, the mansiones Saliorum Palatinorum and a Mithraeum in the area of S. Silvestro in Capite.

Lo stile poetico di Venanzio Fortunato può essere definito «jeweled» come Michael Roberts descrive la poesia della tarda antichità. Caratteristica di questo stile sono le numerose menzioni di pietre preziose, come se Venanzio volesse rendere più prezioso il tessuto stesso della sua poesia.

The paper deals with verse inscriptions from Eastern Late Antiquity, displayed at the entrances of churches, exploring through a selected sample of texts, their functions and purposes, focusing on literary features as part of the more general strategy of Christianizing the civic space of Late Antique cities.

This paper deals with the theme of the “unfinished” through the examination of some exemplary cases from
Greek literature in Late Antiquity. Alongside authorial practices impatient with the labor limae – such as
that of Damascius or Plotinus – or texts that now appear unfinished because of troubles in the manuscript
transmission, there are cases of incomplete texts that have been brought to perfection by other authors,
such as the Homeric Centos by Patricius completed by Eudocia, or the intercultural translation into epic

In the so-called ‘resurgence’ of poetry in Late Antiquity verse inscriptions played a significant role. They eloquently show how widespread was the taste for poetic compositions among the different levels of Late Roman society, pointing also out the social importance of classical paideia. Despite the condemnation of some rigorists, who considered the passion for poetry useless and even dangerous, Christian verse inscriptions entered very early the ‘epigraphic display’ of Late Antique cities.

The paper deals with the early phase of Biblical poetry in the Greek East. The new Christian poems preserved in a papyrus codex from the s0-called Bodmer Library (a group of papyri coming from the area of the city of Panopolis, Upper Egypt), has dramatically shown that in Egypt verse paraphrases of Biblical books were composed already in the middle of the fourth century. Their author had already attempted to give their answer to the challenge represented by a Christian poetry in classical language and metres.