Salutigerum carmen. Forme e usi dell’epistola poetica nella tarda latinità

The paper offers a first draft of a history of the poetic (i.e. metrical and prosimetric) epistle in Latin literature of Late Antiquity, based on a catalogue of 195 texts from the 4th to 7th centuries CE, from Rufus Festus Avienius to Julian of Toledo. After an introduction to the topic (§1), an overview of the authors and texts examined (§2), and a description of the criteria for defining the corpus (§3), the paper focuses on the communicative purposes of the verse epistle (§4), and the aspects that characterise it as a ‘real’ form of written exchange within the socio-cultural elites in the last centuries of Roman civilisation (§5).