Monday, 15 March 2027 | Reusing Homer in Late Antiquity: Stobaeus’ Anthologia and Eudocia’s Homerocentones
Diletta Pompei | PhD Candidate | Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”
Abstract
This paper examines the techniques of reuse and transmission of Homeric poetry in two fundamentally different works of the fifth century AD: Stobaeus’ Anthologia and the Homerocentones, attributed to Eudocia Augusta. Although belonging to distinct literary genres, both texts preserve and rework a significant number of Homeric verses. By analysing their different strategies of selecting, adapting, and transmitting Homeric material, the paper argues that these practices provide valuable evidence for the circulation and transmission of Homeric poetry in Late Antiquity.
The Anthologia transmits sixty-two Homeric excerpts: their distribution, lemmatic presentation and adaptation suggest that Stobaeus relied on pre-existing anthological traditions and on heterogeneous textual sources. Detached from their original narrative contexts, these verses are recontextualised as universal ethical maxims while remaining comparatively conservative in their textual and metrical form.
More than half of these Homeric quotations recur in the Homerocentones, pointing to a shared repertoire of Homeric verses that circulated independently of their original epic contexts. While some textual differences result from anthologising practices and Christian re-contextualisation, others may reflect alternative textual readings independent of—or earlier than—the medieval manuscript tradition.
A comparison of these two works suggests that authors operating in different intellectual and religious settings may have drawn, directly or indirectly, on common repertoires of Homeric material. It also shows how the same traditional material could be reshaped to fulfil different purposes: in Stobaeus, to provide universal ethical exempla; in the Homerocentones, to articulate a Christian narrative. Rather than representing merely derivative literature, these two works demonstrate how Homeric poetry was preserved, reshaped, and transmitted through different practices of reuse in Late Antiquity.
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