A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  Perhaps the most influential of the Christian poets was the Spaniard Prudentius, who died ca. 413. Already in the early 380 s he had written an attack on Symmachus’s appeal for the return of the Altar of Victory to the Senate House (Tränkle 2008). In the long term the work that would have most impact was the Psychomachia, an allegorical text describing the conflict between vice and virtue. For historians of late antique spirituality, however, his Peristephanon, a collection of verses on Christian martyrs, and most especially Spanish martyrs, has provided more insights, illustrating the application of poems and hymns to the growing cult of the saints (Roberts 1993) – something that can also be seen in the poetry of Paulinus of Nola (d. 431). The tradition would continue throughout the fifth and sixth centuries and finds one of its most extended illustrations in the poetic Life of Martin by Venantius Fortunatus (Roberts 2002).

  The main body of large‐scale Christian poetic works from the period, however, is made up of versifications of the Bible, which both paraphrase and comment on the text (Herzog 1975; Nodes 1993; Green 2006). The earliest of these, Juvencus’s versification of the Gospels, dates to the Age of Constantine (McGill 2016). A second poetic version of the Gospels, the Carmen Paschale, was composed, probably in Italy, by the rhetor Sedulius in the first half of the fifth century (Springer 1988, 2013). A century later Arator, a north Italian protegé of Ennodius of Pavia, penned his versification of the Acts of the Apostles.

  The New Testament seems to have attracted poets rather more often than did the Old Testament. The first major versification of the Heptateuch is ascribed to a fifth‐century Gallo‐Roman known to us as Cyprian (though some prefer simply to talk of the Heptateuch Poet). At the end of the fifth century Dracontius, alongside his other poems, wrote an account of the Creation in his De Laudibus Dei (Tizzoni 2012). At almost exactly the same time, and perhaps influenced by Dracontius’s example, Avitus of Vienne set about versifying Genesis and Exodus, or rather, in the case of Genesis he versified one of Augustine’s commentaries on the biblical book (Wood 2001). In addition to five substantial poems on the Old Testament, Avitus wrote a lengthy verse work in praise of chastity, which largely revolves around the piety of women of his own family.

  Chastity, or rather virginity, was also the subject of one of Venantius Fortunatus’s major, and most extended, religious poems, the De Virginitate, written for his patroness and friend, Radegund, the ascetic founder of the monastery of the Holy Cross at Poitiers. Like other of Fortunatus’s poems, this proved a model to later generations, providing inspiration in particular for the late seventh‐century Anglo‐Saxon poet Aldhelm.

  2.6 Letter Writing

  Avitus and Venantius Fortunatus bring us to another of the major genres of late antique literature: letter writing (Sogno, Storin, and Watts 2017; Müller, forthcoming). Of course, the writing and preservation of letters was well established in the classical period, and, indeed, Pliny’s letters were often regarded as a model, both as individual pieces and as a collection. The fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries can be seen as a major period of letter writing, and, as in the case of panegyric, the flowery style could be appropriate. There are the obvious collections, especially those of Symmachus and Sidonius Apollinaris, the latter of whom looks back specifically to both Symmachus and Pliny.

  The early sixth century boasts a remarkable number of collections of letters. The best known is the large collection of Cassiodorus’s official correspondence, the Variae, compiled during the author’s enforced sojurn in Constantinople in the middle of the sixth century (Bjornlie 2013). Closer in kind to the collection of Sidonius are those of Ruricius of Limoges (d. ca. 510) (Mathisen 1999), Avitus of Vienne (Wood 1993; Shanzer and Wood 2002), and Ennodius of Pavia (Kennell 2000). Equally, from the end of the sixth century, there is the collection of occasional verses made by Venantius Fortunatus, the majority of which are, in fact, verse letters (Williard 2014). Covering the whole of the period from the late fifth to the late sixth century there is the multi‐authored collection known as the Epistolae Austrasicae (Barrett and Woudhuysen 2016). This tradition of letter writing lasted into the seventh century, with the letters of Desiderius of Cahors (d. ca. 655) (Mathisen 2013). Many of these letters contain little information of significance: Their main purpose seems often to have been the cultivation and maintenance of networks of friendship, and, indeed, they are frequently described as letters of amicitia. As such, they have been central to the reconstruction of fourth‐, fifth‐, and sixth‐century groups of families and friends.

  All these letters have been interpreted in the light of the Sidonius collection, although in fact some of them differ significantly. Unlike the collections of Symmachus, Sidonius, Cassiodorus, or Fortunatus, those of Avitus, Ruricius, and Ennodius are not authorial. They were put together from archive collections, some perhaps as early as the sixth century, but others, including those of Ennodius, Desiderius, and the Epistolae Austrasicae, in the eighth and ninth centuries, which is when the letters of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) were organized into a Register. Some groups of letters that have been presented as collections (most notably the Epistolae Arelatenses Genuinae) were, in fact, only put together in the nineteenth century (Wood, forthcoming).

  The question of when and how these letters were gathered together is an important one, because it suggests that the interpretation of them as exercises in friendship radically underestimates their range of functions. Some letters undoubtedly were regarded as models for the exercise of friendship and also as models for epistolary style. One small group of seventh‐century letters, of Frodebert of Paris and Importunus of Tours, is even preserved alongside the Formulary of Sens in a Paris manuscript (Walstra 1962; Shanzer 2010; Hen 2012). Other letters, however, have very different functions and were preserved in collections of theology and canon law. They thus have much in common with early collections of papal letters, like the Collectio Avellana, which was apparently put together in the late sixth century (Viezure 2015). The prose works of Avitus present a good example of the range of genres to which letters can be assigned. They seem to have survived in the archives of the Church of Vienne, where they were consulted to create several different collections; and they include a sizeable number of letters that can readily be compared with the epistolary output of Sidonius (who may indeed have been his uncle) and that appear alongside political pieces, which can be best described as mini‐panegyrics, as well as short theological treatises. In addition, the archive, and the earliest known collection made from it, included sermons for special occasions, which would not have been appropriate for the author’s Homiliary, a collection of sermons for the standard feasts of the year. Thus, in talking of the significance of letters among the output of late antiquity, we should be aware that the genre is concerned with far more than the topic of amicitia, which has most attracted historians.

  2.7 History Writing

  Sidonius wrote letters, panegyrics, and also masses for the church, although these have not survived. He refused, however, to write an account of the war in Gaul with the Huns in the time of Attila (Ep. 8.15.1–2). That he should have been invited to write such a work is a reminder that the senatorial aristocracy had been involved in the production and edition of historical works. Symmachus is known to have undertaken the preparation of a new text of Livy (Ep. 9.13). Ammianus Marcellinus’s great history would seem to have had an aristocratic, probably even a court, audience, to judge from the fact that the Greek rhetor Libanius had heard of the success of his public readings (Fromara 1992). His judgment on the strengths and weaknesses of individual emperors and generals was thus addressed to the most influential levels of society.

  The same can be said of some of the other historical works of the period, including the two historical epitomes, the De Caesaribus of Aurelius Victor, who was even appointed governor of Pannonia Secunda by the emperor Julian in 361 (Bird 1994), and the Breviary of Eutropius, who, while not personally so distinguished, was nevertheless appointed magister epistolarum by Co
nstantius before 361 and magister memoriae by Valens in 369 (Bird 1993). The Historia Augusta, a collection of imperial biographies purporting to have been written by several authors in the third century, but, in fact, the product of a single forger in the second half of the fourth century, would seem to belong to this same world (Thomson 2012). Historians and their audiences, thus, were drawn from the world of imperial bureaucrats and from the aristocracy – although Ammianus Marcellinus’s earlier career had been as a soldier. Not surprisingly, like panegyric, history was intended to carry a political message.

  It is worth noting that the Historia Augusta is not the only forged history to have been in circulation in the fourth century, although other examples are not usually categorized as histories. Thus, the story of Troy, which was thought of as historical, saw a remarkable revival in late antiquity. It seems to have been in the fourth century that an abridged version of Homer in Latin, known as the Ilias Latina, composed probably in the first century, attracted attention (Scaffai 1982). In addition, another version of the fall of Troy, the Ephereridos of Dictys of Crete, was translated into Latin, apparently in the fourth century (Yavuz 2015). Among the works that would prove most popular in later generations is the De Excidio Troiae ascribed to Dares of Frigia, but which was apparently a late antique forgery (Yavuz 2015; Clark, forthcoming). Exactly when Dares’s text was written is unclear, nor is it known whether it was based on a Greek original. The Latin text opens with a letter supposedly from Cornelius Nepos to Sallust, announcing the discovery of the work. As a forgery it bears some comparison with the Historia Augusta.

  Another figure who would seem to have been associated with the senatorial classes was Filocalus, the calligrapher who created the so‐called Calendar of 354, a compilation that brought together information on the Caesars, the consuls, and the urban prefects of Rome, alongside the bishops and martyrs of Rome, and attached that information to what is now called a World Chronicle, and a Chronicle of the City of Rome (Salzman 1991). Whereas the epitomes of Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, as well as of the Historia Augusta and the Res Gestae of Ammianus, look back to classical history writing, part of the Filocalus compilation belongs to the traditions that were gaining popularity in Christian circles. Filocalus himself was closely connected to Pope Damasus and, it would seem, to the pious senatorial matron Melania the Elder.

  2.8 Christian History and Hagiography

  Christian historical writing, of course, goes back to the Bible, but what was perhaps the historical work to have most influence was the Chronicle compiled by Eusebius of Caesarea in the reign of Constantine (306–337), which was subsequently translated and extended by Jerome (d. 420) (Burgess 1999; Burgess and Kulikowski 2013). Unlike the prose narrative of Ammianus (which drew its literary inspiration most obviously from Tacitus), Eusebius’s Chronicle was rather a vast annalistic compilation, providing a remarkable synchronization of events in the various empires past and present, each set out in its own column. Although annalistic (in other words, comprising short entries detailing the major event or events in each year) and thus extremely terse in nature, it provided an interpretation of world history through its choice of information and by gradually whittling down the number of empires in existence, until only the Roman Empire remained, thus highlighting its position in Providential History. Most chronicle writing in the early Middle Ages followed the model of Eusebius, often transcribing the Eusebian text as translated by Jerome, with minor alteration, and then continuing the annalistic scheme. Thus, the Eusebian scheme was continued by Prosper of Aquitaine (d. ca. 455) and Hydatius of Tuy (d. 469) in the fifth century, by Marcellinus Comes (d. 534), Cassiodorus, and Marius of Avenches (d. 596) in the sixth, and by Isidore of Seville (600–636) in the seventh (Muhlberger 1990; Croke 2001; Burgess and Kulikowski 2013; Wood 2010, 2015).

  This, however, was not the only pattern followed by historians and, especially, by historians writing in the post‐Roman kingdoms. Thus, Victor of Vita in late fifth‐century North Africa wrote a History of the Vandal Persecutions (Moorhead 1992; Merrills 2011) and Cassiodorus a (now lost) History of the Goths, which served as a point of departure for Jordanes in Constantinople in the middle years of the sixth century, as he interrupted his Historia Romana to write his Getica (the Gothic History) (Christensen 2002). In subsequent decades Gregory of Tours (573–594) set about writing his Ten Books of Histories (Heinzelmann 2001; Reimitz 2015). These used to be classified as “Barbarian histories” because at first sight each one focused on a particular barbarian group (Goffart 1988). In recent years it has rightly been observed that they do not have a great deal in common, and that each of the so‐called Barbarian histories follows a different pattern, although most of them have a strong religious bent. For Victor of Vita the main focus is obviously the Catholic Church and the persecution that it faced in Vandal Africa. For Gregory of Tours the church is also the center of attention, much more so than the Franks.

  The historical writings of Victor and Gregory are closely allied to the biographies of saints, and, indeed, Gregory wrote almost as much hagiography as history. Already in the third century accounts of martyrdom were set down, among the earliest being the passion of the African virgin Perpetua (Berschin 1986; Bremmer and Formisano 2012; Cooper 2013, 105–130). Such accounts, revolving around the arrest, interrogation, and execution of the martyr, became increasingly popular and continued to be written long after the period of persecutions; many of the later acts concerned fictitious saints, who were invented to justify, promote, or explain a saint cult. They were often composed in the context of ecclesiastical conflict, as in the case of a substantial number of acta produced in Rome in the early sixth century. They were frequently short and, on occasion, were composed to be read on the feast day of the martyr. Usually they are anonymous, although some, for instance that of St. Maurice and the Theban Legion, written by Eucherius of Lyons (d. ca. 449), were written by ecclesiastics with a fine sense of rhetorical style.

  With the end of the persecution hagiographers also began to write about saints who had not died as martyrs. Whereas the martyr acts were concerned largely with the assertion of Christianity, the lives of confessors had a rather broader range of concerns, promoting particular styles of asceticism, episcopal practice, or attachment to specific theological positions. The first life of a confessor to have a major impact was that of Antony, written by Athanasius of Alexandria in ca. 360, but already translated into Latin by Evagrius of Antioch before 374. This initiated a vogue for the writing about the desert fathers, both in the lives of individual saints, and also in collections of anecdotes about the holy men of Egypt (Harmless 2004). Among Latin writers Jerome contributed to the hagiographical literature of the desert with his, at least partially fictional, lives of Hilarian, Malchus, and Paul the First Hermit (Bastiaensen 1994), while John Cassian (d. 435) set out his knowledge of the desert fathers as a model for the ascetic life in his Conferences and Institutes (Stewart 1998).

  Hagiography of the desert fathers, together with an interest in the Holy Land, which emerged as a focus for pilgrimage after the days of Constantine and, more particularly, after the journey to Jerusalem undertaken by his mother Helena (d. 330), led to the development of a further literary genre: the travelogue concerned with visits to the holy places. The earliest of these was that of the Bordeaux pilgrim, composed in 333. This was followed in the 380 s by an account written by a woman known to us as Egeria. Among several later accounts is that of the so‐called Piacenza pilgrim, dated to the 570 s. Descriptive writing about the Holy Land, admittedly largely secondhand, would continue through into the eighth century (Hunt 1982; Wilkinson 2002).

  The West could scarcely boast a desert setting as could Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. It could, however, boast ascetics, most notably Martin of Tours (d. 397), who, although he ended his life as bishop of Tours, was initially an ascetic and a monastic founder. His life by Sulpicius Severus became one of the cornerstones of Western hagiography (Stancliffe 1983). It was followed by Sulp
icius’s Dialogues, written in large measure to show that Martin was the equal of the desert fathers. The Life of Martin was followed by a number of other hagiographical works devoted to Western ascetics and monastic founders, notably a cluster of lives concerned with the island monastery of Lérins and, from the early sixth century, a substantial tripartite life, the anonymous Life of the Fathers of Jura (Martine 1968).

  Monks and abbots, however, did not provide the dominant material for hagiography in the fifth‐ and sixth‐century West, although there was something of a resurgence of monastic hagiography in the seventh century. Rather, the major texts tended to be devoted to the lives of bishops. Among the earliest, and the most influential, were Paulinus’s Life of Ambrose, written in 422, and Possidius’s Life of Augustine (written before 439). Both of these are regularly cited as models by later hagiographers. Also of considerable importance is the Life of Germanus of Auxerre, written ca. 480 by Constantius, a priest of Lyons, at the request of his bishop, Patiens, but addressed additionally to Sidonius Apollinaris (Thompson 1984). Among significant episcopal lives from the first half of the sixth century there are that of Fulgentius of Ruspe by Facundus and that of Caesarius of Arles, written by Cyprian of Toulon together with a number of friends. From the second half of the century there is a sizeable collection of lives penned by Venantius Fortunatus (Collins 1981).