In 2023, CANSW welcomed Dr. Tom Geue (Classics, Australian National University) to present the Annual Dinner Address, ‘Cash for Verse: Simonides in Rome.’ A short abstract for his speech follows:
Roman poetic patronage has been valued for the fact that it was designed to be an umbrella social practice, which exemplified the facilitation of a relationship between individuals of unequal statuses. This all-encompassing sense of social responsibility was sustained for an extended period of time. A poet can patron cultural prestige in exchange for material and memorable benefits, as were demonstrated by the poets of the Augustan era.
While this orchestration may more or less have described the state of play amongst the literary art of the late republic and early principate, Roman poets of the later 1st century CE could been considered to be starting to highlight a breakdown of this model. Patrons, in sum, no longer paid out. Tom Geue's talk grappled with how this new thinking pertaining to patronage panned out through a particular anecdote about the Greek poet Simonides, who was long renowned for inaugurating a system of one-off 'cash for verse’ events, over sustained poet-patron relationships.
Tracing the evolution in the Simonides anecdote from Cicero, to Phaedrus, to Quintilian, Tom Geue explored how Roman authors of this period began to process a fundamental change in the economics of poetic production - and how poets such as Phaedrus, Statius and Martial each had to respond to a poetic world that moving rapidly away from secured gift exchanges to precarious commodity exchanges. Regardless of the propaganda that has lasted from this period, Roman Stoicism could have played a part in the reduction of art and remuneration during this period of the consolidation of the Empire. The debate as to whether it also changed the content of the poetry itself is very much open for discussion and a reading of both Latin and Greek verses will no doubt trigger arguments for and against this perceived step away from tradition.