Introduction

Summary

In the past few years, it has been possible to notice parallel developments in the study of both Latin and Greek late antique poetry, two neighbouring and growing scholarly fields. Recently published studies reveal an increased focus on the contemporary context and, in relation to that, on the ‘otherness’ of late antique aesthetics, when compared with the poetics of earlier periods that classically trained scholars have been taught to admire.¹ Long considered poetry of bad taste from a period of decline, late antique poetry fascinates classicists today mainly because of its otherness, its productive reception of the classical period, its innovations in terms of literary forms, and the creativity with which it responds to the ‘seismic cultural changes’² of late antique society.