Eisthesis, divisione dei versi, percezione dei cola negli epigrammi epigrafici in età tardoantica

This paper deals with the mise en page of many inscriptional Greek epigrams belonging to Imperial and especially late Roman period, in order to verify if there is a relationship between the arrangement of verses and line-divisions and metrical structures, namely of the hexameter and the elegiac couplet. Starting from the first century AD, we can clearly observe a tendence to arrange verses in inscriptional epigrams by dividing the lines at the caesurae, mainly at the middle caesura (which was the most important for aknowledging the verse’s structure). This phaenomenon is, in author’s view, significant for the perception that audience had of the structure of the hexameter and of the pentameter. Recent research of late antique hexameter, which explains the emergence of a new metrical style – that represented by the poetry of Nonnus and his followers – otherwise than in terms of evolution and response to the condition of literary communication in Late Antiquity, i.e. to oral performance o