Recitationes

The recitationes were a literary practice of the ancient Rome at the same time ludic, political and commercial. It was a question of making one or more public readings ( recitatio , recitationes in the plural) of a text. Some occurred in public places (the Thermes for example), even on the Forum.

Origins

History

The recitationes developed much under the Empire and in particular under Auguste. The objective of the public readers was to make known itself of a public in order to obtain a social protection and pecuniary (commercial aspect): the recitationes took place, for the majority, near a privileged public and closed circles. This public was more or less amateur of literature, although this concept did not have the same reception in the Antiquité as with the modern Time; actually the recitationes cover especially an political aspect.

Indeed, each reader was protected from a bookstore or a patron (Mécène itself, minister of Auguste, had a very active role in the Mécénat; the term comes from its name). The goal of a reader was to ensure his career while being protected from most fortunate of the patrons. The patron, politician or fortunate public figure, remunerated his artist and ordered works to him in which was thanked the patron; this last could even appear under the features of one of the characters of the text read. The orders often aimed at reproducing Greek works in Latin and in the Roman fashion of the moment (see meter). This Latinization of the Greek Littérature was explicit: let us recall that majority of the Roman citizens, and at least those which attended the recitationes , were bilingual and knew the Greek perfectly, language of the trade and the literature. Thus, in the Bucoliques, Virgile includes the Greek dialog between shepherds of Arcadie and built Topos starting from there a poem in Latin meter.

The literary or ludic aspect of the recitationes is thus, so to speak, almost secondary. Or, at least, it cannot be evoked apart from their aspects policy and commercial.

One could compare the Roman recitationes with the readings of living room in the European aristocratic world of the traditional age, or with the literature of court of the Moyen-âge and with the Blason S of the Renaissance.

Horace, Virgile, Properce was famous authors of recitationes . Some famous worms of the Odes of Horace makes well include/understand the stake of a recitatio : to set up an artistic monument like made the Greeks and by taking again the elements of their literature; to remain for prosperity as that which will have known to install in Rome a Littérature Latin (but not national) reproducing the Greek Littérature:

ventilated Exegi monumentum perennius
regalic situ pyramidum altius,
quod not imber edax, not Aquilo impotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series and fuga temporum.
Non omnis moriar multaque leave mei
uitabit Libitinam. Vsque ego will post
crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium
scandet cum tacita uirgine pontifex.
Dicar, qua uiolens obstrepit Aufidus
and qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
regnauit populorum, ex humili potens
princeps Aeolium Carmen AD Italos
deduxisse modos. Sume superbiam
quaesitam meritis and mihi Delphica
lauro cinge uolens, Melpomene, comam. ).
(Horace, Odes , III, 33)

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