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Poetry was the most affordable form of art in ancient Rome. Still, the study of Latin poetry has traditionally, almost exclusively, focused on a small canon of texts – that were enjoyed exclusively by the financial elite in those times. The EU-funded MAPPOLA project focuses on the study of some 4000 Latin verses that have survived from the third century BC that also represent ancient Rome’s middle and lower social strata. MAPPOLA is an unprecedented effort to democratise the understanding of Roman poetry. It aims to forge a new area of empirical and quantitative research, alongside traditional qualitative approaches, into Latin poetry and its European legacy.