About

The project MAPPOLA – Mapping Out the Poetic Landscape(s) of the Roman Empire was an unprecedented effort to democratise our understanding of Roman poetry.

While the study of Roman poetry has traditionally and historically almost exclusively focused on a small, judiciously transmitted canon of texts (a segment of Rome’s artistic production that favours the poetry that was produced, enjoyed, and controlled, by a political, social, and financial urban elite, reinforcing their claim to cultural superiority), MAPPOLA’s principal aim was fundamentally to reassess the body of evidence that is the verse inscriptions from the Roman Empire as evidence for poetry as a ubiquitous, inclusive cultural practice of the people(s) of ancient Rome beyond the palaces of its urban aristocracy

A profoundly multidisciplinary project that drew on recent methodological advances in linguistic, historical, and archaeological scholarship, MAPPOLA sought to provide answers to the following questions:

• How is the empire’s considerable regional and ethnic diversity reflected in the engagement with inscribed verse?
• How and where did poetic landscapes emerge, and what inspired them?
• What was the cultural and social significance of inscribed Latin verse?
• How did subcultures and poetic subversion take shape?
• How did inscribed poetry transcend and transgress artificially imposed boundaries and abstractions?