Numeros Veniebat ad Aptos – Ovid’s Verses as Poetic Material of Croatian Latinists
Autor institution: Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Abstract:
From the beginnings of Croatian literature until at least the First World War, every educated person in Croatia was acquainted with Ovid’s poetry. The writers who wrote in Latin, as well as the schoolboys who practised composing Latin verses, were more than merely acquainted with the contents of Ovid’s works. Stylistically speaking, Ovid, as a master of Latin versification, especially when it came to the elegiac distich, offered abundant “material” – elegant and authentic versifying solutions.
It can, therefore, be assumed that Ovidian diction is present in verses of Croatian Latinism. We do not know, however, how much of Ovid’s influence there is in the “genome” of Croatian Latinist poetry. This contribution offers the first answers to this question, limiting the research to circa 265,000 verses of Croatian Latinists included in the digital collection Croatiae auctores Latini, and to Ovid’s works created in exile – elegiac collections Tristia and Ex Ponto. The research is further narrowed to the characteristic place of Latin verse, the place where poetic memory comes to the fore – the so-called clausula, several concluding words (two concluding feet) of Latin hexameter and pentameter. We will report on how many of Ovidian clausulae from Tristia and Ex Ponto are present in different authors and in different periods, as well as offer an estimate of the “popularity”, that is, frequency of specific clausulae.