The cultural landscape of the Hellenistic period is many-sided and, in order to obtain a good vision of its shadowed angles, we need to look past the literature flourishing in the court and focus on the arts performed in the city. In the frame of popular literature and entertainment, we acknowledge the poeti vaganti movement, a massive turnout of artists travelling throughout the main cultural centers of the Greek world. These professionals of literature and music—whose careers and stories are mainly documented by epigraphy—used to perform their forte or re-perform renowned masterpieces at the ἀγῶνες or at extra-agonistic occasions and built their careers showing off at the most prestigious displays. The idea of the arts on-the-move that finds ratio in the travel and in the hic et nunc performance is the very center of a cultural phenomenon that deeply impacted the history, culture, and society of Hellenism. The following represent efforts thus far to explicate this phenomenon:
“Mobility, internationalism, and interculturality in the pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic Athens,” in People of Knowledge on the Move. Networks, Connectivity and Cultural Mobility in the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Early Archaic Period to Late Antiquity, ed. M. Dana and M. Haake. Stuttgart 2022 (forthcoming).
“Percorsi d’Autore. Autorialità nella letteratura popolare di età ellenistica. Il panorama epigrafico dei poeti vaganti,” SemRom 2022 (forthcoming).
“Some additional notes on the ancient side flute,” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 10 (2022), 76-96. https://brill.com/view/journals/grms/grms-overview.xml.
F. Camia and A. Cinalli (eds.), Conversations on Hellenism. Sharing Insights on the Poeti Vaganti Project, Classics@ 19. Center for Hellenic Studies. https://classics-at.chs.harvard.edu/volume/classics19-conversations-on-hellenism-sharing-insights-on-the-poeti-vaganti-project/.
“The past sets the context for the present. Preserving the legacy of musical and poetic tradition in the Hellenistic period,” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 8. 2 (2020), 230-253. https://brill.com/view/journals/grms/8/2/grms.8.issue-2.xml?language=en.
“Vita artistica e culturale nella Creta ellenistica”, Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 126.3 (2020), 103-126. https://www.torrossa.com/it/resources/an/4757874.
