The Carmen Priami ("Priam's Song") is a lost Latin poem known from the quotation of a single line by Varro.Varro, 7.28. The unknown poet, "a remarkable reactionary,"Edward Courtney, The Fragmentary Latin Poets, p. 44. rejects the Hellenizing trend in Latin poetry led by Ennius () and adopts a deliberately archaic style, invoking the Camenae:
The invocation of the Muse is a convention of Greco-Roman poetry, and Ennius announced his intention to leave behind the rusticity of native poetic traditions and embrace the sophistication of the Greeks with service to the Muses. His immediate predecessors Livius and Naevius had asserted their place among traditional Roman poets, or vates, by continuing to invoke instead the Camenae,Enrica Sciarrino, "A Temple for the Professional Muse: The Aedes Herculis Musarum and Cultural Shifts in Second-Century B.C. Rome," in Rituals in Ink (Franz Steiner, 2004), p. 46 online; Anthony James Boyle, Roman Epic (Routledge, 1993), p. 39 online. a group of goddesses, varying in number, who were associated with fresh-water springs, or fontes, and thus metaphorically "sources" of inspiration. These were attributes also of the Muses, and while the Camenae never lost their Roman character, they became increasingly identified with their Greek counterparts.Prudence J. Jones, Reading Rivers in Roman Literature and Culture (Lexington Books, 2005), p. 59 online.
The poet of the uses artificially archaic language. The line was composed in the Saturnian meter, which had ceased to be used and which the poet misunderstands, misplacing the caesura.The technical aspects of the caesura Korschiana are discussed under Saturnian; Courtney, Fragmentary Latin Poets, p. 44. "The motive for such a use," notes literary historian Gian Biagio Conte, "could only be to lend substance to some intuition of primitive preliterary epic composition."Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 1999), p. 25.
The poem is among the "countertendencies" in Latin literature that reveal Roman ambivalence toward the adoption of Greek culture.Sander M. Goldberg, Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic: Poetry and Its Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 26.
See also Carmina Convivalia
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