neōteros

neōteros, any of a group of poets who sought to break away from the didactic-patriotic tradition of Latin poetry by consciously emulating the forms and content of Alexandrian Greek models. The neōteroi deplored the excesses of alliteration and onomatopoeia and the ponderous metres that characterized the epics and didactic works of the Latin Ennian tradition. They wrote meticulously refined, elegant, and sophisticated epyllia (brief epics), lyrics, epigrams, and elegies. They cultivated a literature of self-expression and a light poetry of entertainment and introduced into Latin literature the aesthetic attitude later known as “art for art’s sake.”

First arising in the 2nd century bc, the school was essentially non-Roman; it centred on the Milanese poet-teacher Publius Valerius Cato, and most of its adherents came from remote regions of northern Italy. Among them is Catullus, who, during the Ciceronian period (70 to 43 bc) of the Golden Age, wrote finely wrought love lyrics and epyllia in Latin and Greek. Catullus’s 95th poem hails the obscure epyllion Zmyrna by Gaius Helvius Cinna as a model text of the new movement. The movement’s supporters attracted the hostile attention of the famous orator and minor poet Marcus Tullius Cicero, who labeled them the “new poets” in both Greek (neoteroi) and Latin (poetae novi). He may have been referring in both languages to the same disliked poets, singers such as Euphorion, probably the 3rd-century Hellenistic Greek poet of that name. Modern critics often call these poets by Cicero’s term, neoteric.

In the Augustan Age (43 bc to ad 18), the influence of the neōteroi can be discerned particularly in the pastoral idylls of Virgil and the elegies of Sextus Propertius and Tibullus and in a general refinement of works of the didactic-patriotic tradition. Two centuries later a group called the novel poets modeled themselves after the neōteroi, writing in Greek and following Greek models.