Folkloricum
Archive of Ancient Folklore
Greek and Latin authors did not pay much attention to the popular culture of their civilisations. Material evidence on the daily life of the popular classes is also limited, compared to official public and religious documentation. A folklore of the ancients, however, does exist. Authors have referred to it with the lexicon of ‘belief’ (λέγεται, dicitur) or of the ‘countryside’ (ἄγροικοι, rustic), but also of the ‘popular’ (δῆμος, vulgus), albeit more rarely. Artists and craftsmen depicted it mainly as a funerary tribute or as a curious incursion into everyday life.
There emerge, from precious testimonia, beliefs and superstitions, fables and proverbs, figures of the imagination, songs and other types of musical forms, pharmacopoeia and medicinal remedies, apotropaic gestures and practices, and many other traits of a popular culture of the ancients. A conception of the world that reveals, in the final analysis, the widespread sense of fragility of the ancient man in the face of the fatigue and the uncertainty of work, of many natural phenomena, of life and death.
This Greek and Roman folklore can often be approached (and effectively compared) on the one hand with other ancient Euro-Mediterranean traditions, and on the other hand with the documentation of modern popular culture, especially in certain conservative areas such as central Greece and southern Italy.
Alongside the better known learned cultural tradition, ranging from the ‘classics’ to the contemporary authors, one can thus discover a lesser known but still fascinating popular cultural tradition: the folklore of the ancients.
Ut vere loquamur, superstitio fusa per gentes oppressit omnium fere animos atque hominum imbecillitatem occupavit.
Per dire la verità, la superstizione, diffusa tra gli uomini, ha oppresso gli animi di quasi tutti e ha tratto profitto dalla debolezza umana.
Archive
About 400 entries form the core of this repertory, in which hypertext searches are also possible. Each entry consists of an essay (downloadable in pdf), ancient and modern comparisons, audio and video, iconography and bibliography. A section of general and thematic studies completes our archive.
The Antico e Moderno Culture Center
In Rome, at Via Prenestina 94, the Antico e Moderno Association has its operational headquarters, which offers a space for study, meetings and cultural activities, as well as a permanent exhibition of objects of ancient and modern material culture.