The poems of Dracontius in their Vandalic and Visigothic contexts

The goal of this thesis is to examine the cultural transformation of the Roman world as witnessed in the poetry and poetic traditions of the Latin-speaking West. In essence this thesis asks one fundamental question: when did the Late Antique world finally transform into the medieval? In order to answer this question, it will focus its investigation on one particular representative case-study. This case-study is provided by the poetry of the Late Antique North African poet Dracontius. After their initial composition in the final decades of the fifth century, part of Dracontius' corpus, the Salisfactio and Book I of the De Laudibus Dei, were redacted by Eugenius II of Toledo in mid-seventh-century Visigothic Spain. These poems, then, allow us to examine both Dracontius' own context in the Vandal kingdom of North Africa as well as Eugenius' context in late-Visigothic Iberia. This examination into Dracontius' Vandalic and Visigothic contexts will centre around one particular, and frequently undervalued, source of evidence: the use of loci similes. The investigation, split into two parts, will use these loci similes to examine and analyse the poetic methods employed by these two authors and the cultural mindsets behind them. Although the fundamental argument will be based on the shared texts, consideration will be taken both of the other works of these two authors and the wider literary landscape. After completing this investigation, the thesis will seek to explain its findings through a cultural historical analysis of their wider cultural and geographical contexts. After contextualising these works, the thesis will then give its own explanation, based on this new poetic evidence, as to why, and how, the final transformation of the Roman world came about.