06 - Radivilias, The Epic of the Lithuanian People

The Latin poem Radivilias (1592) by Jonas Radvanas is the best poetic fruit of the Neo-latin epic genre, flowered within the boarder of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at the end of the 16th century. The poem in four books, following the classical epic lectio (the Virgilian and Homeric ones), represents some very little-known war events in Eastern Europe which go under the name of ‘Livonian war' (1558-1583): a series of campaigns conducted by the Russian czar Ivan ‘the Terrible' looking for the access to the Baltic Sea. The poem focuses mainly on the deeds of the military captain Mikolaj ‘The Red' Radvilas, at the service of the Polish-Lithuanian state, depicted, in Radvanas verses, as a sort of 'new Aeneas'.

In particular, the third book contains useful toponymical information, hydronyms, precise historical notes which allows a better knowledge of the geographical area of the GDL and the historical-political season of that time (Žanna Nekraševič-Karotkaja, Latin Epic Poetry and its Evolution as a Factor of Cultural Identity in Central and Eastern Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in Latinitas in the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Giovanna Sedina, Firenze University Press, 2014, p. 26). An example of this is the long Catalogus Optimorum strictly linked to an overgrown Namenfreudigkeit (Radiv. III, 152-178). The poem also glimpses the strictly Lithuanian viewpoint about the so-called "Union of Lublin" (1569) after which the crowns of Poland and Lithuania were officially unified (Radiv. III, 123-139)

In Radvanas' verses one notices a perfect example of an alternative translatio imperii: after the fall of Constantinople; the third Rome was commonly identified in Moscow but in Radivilias it is shifted to Vilnius, the actual capital of Lithuania following a true foundation's legend: Lithuanian people comes from the exile of a certain and unidentified Palaemon (Radiv. I, 36-37 and more III, 89-104).

From a linguistic point of view, Radvanas shows a very strong knowledge of epic models, with frequent borrowings from other literary genres: Virgil and his imitators are obviously traced but Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Ennius, Claudianus and others are also present.

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Presenters

Simone Carboni, Independent Scholar

  SCS-31