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• Continuities in late antique literacy: the evidence from North Africa and Gaul

  177–185

  Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

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  53

  In this article I reconsider the evidence for ancient literacy from late antique North Africa and Gaul in order to reassess how the end of the “epigraphic habit” in the third century may have changed the popular contexts and notional associations of writing. Analyzing evidence for the Christian “epitaphic habit,” as well as for the production of legal and economic documents between the third and sixth centuries CE, I propose that late antique uses of writing attest to numerous continuities with their early imperial counterparts, including an interest not only in the pragmatic but also the performative character of ancient literacy.

• Ennodius und Martial

  195–205

  Tamás Adamik

  Views:

  91

  Magnus Felix Ennodius, the bishop of Ticinum (modern Pavia), died in 521. He has left letters, poems, oratorical pieces, saints’ lives and controversial literature. Ennodius’ writings were composed for specific audiences on particular occasions. His Latinity is very literate, syntactically complex, and difficult to understand. He cultivates the short literary forms: letters, panegyrics, declamatory themes (dictiones), short poems, epithalamium, epigrams, epitaphs, hymns. In the preface of his epithalamium for Maximus, he displays the essential qualities of spring with Martial’s vocabulary. This fact directed my attention to the relation of Ennodius to Martial. Comparing Ennodius’s epigrams with Martial’s, I realized that in his epigrams Ennodius imitated Martial both in topics and expressions.