A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  Although not exactly hagiography, there is also the collection of papal lives known as the Liber Pontificalis. The first group of these apparently belongs to the very late fifth century. Subsequently lives were added, albeit somewhat spasmodically. Rather than presenting the popes as saints, the collection was rather more concerned with their rulership of the Roman Church, with the result that in certain respects the lives are closer to imperial biographies than the hagiography of saints (Davis 2000).

  By the sixth century literature was unquestionably associated primarily with the church and with Christian religion. So, too, learning was increasingly dominated by the church, with the result that it ceased to be associated with centers of court or aristocratic influence – it is notable that the fifth and sixth centuries saw the first surviving literary works to be composed by Britons in the British Isles, the Confessio of Patrick (Howlett 1994) and the De Excidio Britonum of Gildas (George 2009) while Spanish authors like Hydatius of Tuy made their careers in the land of their birth rather than gravitating toward the Mediterranean (Burgess 1993). The collapse of the urban school did not mean that the skills of the grammarian or the rhetor were entirely lost, although written Latin came more and more to reflect everyday usage, rather than the artificial language of the rhetorical schools. The classics were not entirely forgotten; indeed the earliest manuscripts of most classical texts come from the Merovingian and, more particularly, the Carolingian world. Classical narratives survived, although not always in ways that Virgil would have recognized, as one can see from the forgery ascribed to Dares of Phrygia. Above all, the requirements of the new Christian and sub‐Roman world were different from those of the Empire, and even of the late Empire, and this is reflected in the literature.

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