Certain narratives die hard, and one of the particularly persistent narratives in our field, told in a range of nuances from the simplistic to the somewhat more refined, is that of a Roman empire divided into two halves, a Greek-speaking east and a Latinate west.

While linguistic scholarship of the last twenty years has enabled us to see the linguistic landscape with much greater clarity, and while historical research has done much to deepen our understanding of language policy and practice as related to social stratification and administrative / military use(s), the field of literary and cultural studies remains largely stuck in the convenient, but long outdated narrative. The situation is not helped by disciplinary divisions between ‘Greek scholars’ and ‘Latin scholars’, even where they work on roughly contemporary evidence.

The MAPPOLA project investigates the poetic landscape(s) of the Roman Empire, both in its static, local dimensions and with a view to its dynamics, e. g. caused by forms of mobility and dislocation of individuals, and entire groups of people, in the ancient world.

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