Hexameters beyond the canon: new poetry on papyri from Roman and Byzantine Egypt

Existing literary histories of ancient Greek literature tend to focus almost exclusively on 'canonical' authors, dividing Christian from pagan literature and thus obscuring a number of key features. The project aims at correcting this perspective by studying the diffusion and circulation of non-canonical Greek hexameter poetry within the multilingual and multicultural context of Roman Egypt from the 1st to the 6th century CE. This is the first systematic attempt at charting the textual, cultural and historical dynamics of a rich but understudied body of occasional, use-oriented literature, commonly known as Gebrauchsliteratur. This functional poetry covers a wide range of genres over a period of time that saw momentous changes in the cultural, political and religious scene of Roman Egypt. Our vantage point will be that of Oxyrhynchus, a provincial metropolis in middle Egypt, that is, outside the main centres of power (Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Antioch). The hexameter was considered in antiquity, both in classical and post-classical times, as the most illustrious literary form of communication. It was reclaimed and adopted for functional purposes at all levels of society, from the high echelons and grandees to everyday people commemorating local events, private and public, from amateurs to wandering poets, from teachers to civil servants willing to please some superior, and more or less literate soldiers recording their social aspirations etc. The varied and multiform nature of these texts allows us to recover an entire strand of literature otherwise ignored by the official high culture: it provides a rare glimpse of the everyday cultural life of the time from a geographically peripheral perspective. The edition, on-line and in print, of 120 unpublished papyri of new hexameter poetry will substantially increase the existing body of evidence and will help us offer an interpretative framework for its cultural-historical analysis (the social functions of occasional poetry at large). To map the development over time of this mid-to-low-brow production enables us to see how traditional genres adapted to respond to the changed conditions of literary production. Comparison of this type of poetry with its closer analogue, the contemporary epigraphic production (metrical inscriptions and graffiti) of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire is another important step towards a more comprehensive understanding of this type of literature and its literary, cultural and social value. As well as scholarly publications (editions, online and in print of the new papyri; a multi-authored monograph; peer-reviewed articles), the project will have a substantial web presence, containing materials for public use (including podcasts) and a user-friendly, searchable version of the database, all in open-access. The impact beyond the academy will thus be primarily cultural: the most transformative step will be to make this neglected material open and accessible to the lay-public. To promote this wider impact the project envisages: (i) the creation of an engaging, outward-facing website containing audio and video-recordings, images, mini-essays, excerpts from the poems and links and a freely accessible database; (ii) a series of schools talks, arranged via a partnership with the Iris Project, targeted at promoting Classics in state schools. As physical written artefacts from the distant past, papyri attract immediate attention and have the ability to connect school children concretely and vividly with the ancient world; (iii) an exhibition in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, showcasing some of the new material. Finally, but equally importantly for the educative ethos of the project, some of the unpublished material will be made available for study to undergraduate and graduate students, who will thus learn the technicalities but also the excitement of hands-on scholarship.