“Inscribing Anonymity: Un-Authored Poetry in Roman Epigraphic Culture”

A research project by Dr Alessandra Tafaro, British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow (2023-2026)

The project ‘Inscribing Anonymity: Un-Authored Poetry in Riman Epigraphic Culture’ (fully funded by the British Academy, 2023-2026), examines anonymous metrical inscriptions from Rome and Pompeii (I century BC to II century AD) to assess for the first time the role of anonymity in Roman epigraphic and poetic culture. Texts without authors have long been victim of neglect or aesthetic prejudice and are underrepresented in the literary canon. A recent rehabilitation of anonymous poetry in Latin literary scholarship has disrupted key traditional assumptions about aesthetic worth, authorship, and authenticity. Yet, despite its field-defining contribution, epigraphic poetry has remained neglected.

This project seeks to shift traditional perspectives on Roman poetry as an exclusively highbrow activity, by offering a new analysis of the political, literary, and cultural function of anonymity in epigraphic poetic culture. Led by Dr Alessandra Tafaro, British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the BSR, this research deploys textual and philological analysis of Latin texts alongside methodologies devised by studies in ancient visual and material culture. In situ research of epigraphic evidence takes place at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, the Naples National Archaeological Museum, the ‘National Museum of Rome – Baths of Diocletian’, in order to develop a socio-cultural reading of epigraphic communication and of the complex interfaces between inscribed and literary texts. Via this interdisciplinary methodology, this project seeks to reshape scholarly understandings of political discourses, identities, aspects of gender relations, practices of citation, and modes of authorship.