Intellectual Spaces in Narratives of the City (Topoi C-6-5)

While the pertinent literary discourses from the early Roman historians down to the Augustan and imperial poets have been investigated extensively for centuries, it has escaped scholarly attention that the close link between Rome and the north African metropolis as literary and intellectual spaces survived the destruction of the Punic city and the Augustan resettlement and continued, albeit transformed, until late antiquity. Rome by itself is of interest as a centre of politics and culture and as the meeting-point of the intellectual elite of the entire Roman empire. Carthage is the major centre of culture and of church politics in western North Africa, where a prominent series of members of these intellectual elites was recruited, studied or taught. There is abundant scholarship on late antique Rome (the ‚Romidee‘) and sufficiant research on Christian North Africa. A comprehensive comparative study of Rome and Carthage as intellectual spaces during the later Roman empire is however still a desideratum. This project aimed at filling this gap, at least partially.