Envoi: Migrancy

Summary

Looking back over the volume’s contents, which show how Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ migration from Greece to Rome frames his life-long choice to write across Greek and Roman culture and to find ways to knit the two together, this envoi argues that he is best understood in the light of contemporary thinking about migrancy, especially by the Francophone Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant. As a migrant writer and an imitator who champions the act of imitation, Dionysius helps us see not only imperial Greek but Roman literature as a literature of migrancy. Glissant’s insight into the ways migrant writing organizes itself around relations to others provocatively illuminates the styles and ethics of Romans who in the act of writing ceaselessly engaged in the act of relating to another language and another culture: Greece.