The Carmina Convivalia were ancient Roman banquet songs from the pre-literary period. Guests sang or recited them during formal meals to praise the great deeds of noble ancestors. Very little of them has survived, although some scholars have linked the surviving fragments of the Carmen Priami and the Carmen Nelei to this tradition.See e.g.
History The Carmina Convivalia were sung by guests or young noblemen (pueri), accompanied by the tibia, during banquets held at the homes of prominent Roman families. Their purpose was to glorify the deeds of the family's illustrious ancestors and recount the myths of Rome's founding and its most famous military exploits. According to scholars like Giambattista Vico, Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Arnaldo Momigliano the epics and legends of ancient Rome originated from these ancient ballads. Massimo Lenchantin de Gubernatis has proposed that Ennius, Naevius and Virgil drew on these traditional Latin folk poems, combining them with Greek epic motifs and techniques.
Testimonies Our only source of information about the Carmina Convivalia is the writings of classical Latin authors such as Cato the Elder, Cicero and Varro. Two poems, the Carmen Nelei and the Carmen Priami, about which we know very little, are sometimes cited as examples of the Carmina Convivalia. According to Cicero:
In a surviving fragment of his lost treatise De Vita Populi Romani, Varro relates that:
From a passage of Dionysius of Halicarnassus's Roman Antiquities and an ode by Horace, it appears that songs celebrating the founding heroes were probably still recited in the classical period, in line with the cultural restoration policy implemented by Augustus.Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, I, 79, 10; VIII, 62.
Horace himself provides us with a poetic description of the Carmina Convivalia:
Notes
Bibliography