A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  One function assigned to late antique panegyric throughout its history has a dark cast: The form stands as a tool of deceitful flattery. Famously, critiques of panegyric’s dishonesty date to the period. If we take a lead from Lactantius in the early fourth century, we find a highly sensitive situation. Lactantius criticizes pagan poets for raising their ancestors to the status of gods and likens that practice to the delivery of mendacious praise to kings: sicut faciunt qui apud reges, etiam malos, panegyricis mendacibus adulantur. quod malum a Graecis ortum est: quorum levitas, instructa dicendi facultate et copia, incredibile est quantas mendaciorum nebulas excitaverit (“they are just the same, those who adulate kings – even bad ones – with dishonest panegyrics. This evil came from the Greeks: It is unbelievable what clouds of lies their fickleness has roused, informed by their facility and capacity to speak” Div. Inst.1.15.13). Lactantius’s racist overtones were reprised by Isidore, Bishop of Seville, in the seventh century, in his definition of “panegyric”: panegyricum est licentiosum et lasciviosum genus dicendi in laudibus regum, in cuius conpositione homines multis mendaciis adulantur. quod malum a Graecis exortum est, quorum levitas instructa dicendi facultate et copia incredibili multas mendaciorum nebulas suscitavit (“panegyric is the licentious and lascivious genre of speaking in praise of kings, in the composition of which men give praise through many lies. This evil came from the Greeks, whose fickleness, informed by an incredible facility and capacity to speak, raised many clouds of lies” Etymologiae 6.8.7).

  Isidore’s association of panegyric with Greek culture should not give the impression that the form was unfamiliar in the Latin west at the time and might, rather, be characterized as an outspoken extension (via Lactantius in particular) of the aggressive denunciation of the form as Greek that featured variously in the late republic and early empire. Isolated remarks in late republican and early imperial evidence suggest an identification of panegyrical discourse as Greek rather than Roman (i.e. Latin); for example, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.15 insists that opportunities for panegyric were infrequent in Roman society. Cicero, meanwhile, distinguishes Roman custom from the Greek: nos laudationibus non ita multum uti soleremus (“we are not used to employing laudationes that much” De Oratore 2.341). This attitude was to be echoed in the pages of Quintilian, who claimed that Roman deployment of praise‐discourse was geared toward practical affairs: sed mos Romanus etiam negotiis hoc munus inseruit (“but Roman practice has even woven this task into business matters” Inst. Orat. 3.7.1–2; Pernot 2015, p. 9). The word panegyricus is Greek, originally an adjective describing a public gathering (which, itself, is revealing of the contexts in which such literature was performed) (Russell 1998, pp. 19–21; Rees 2010, 23). The term panegyricus is not common in classical or late Latin – the cases of Lactantius and Isidore are exceptional rather than the norm – and other late antique examples may still carry unwanted traces of Greek cultural association (although, perhaps, late antiquity’s increased familiarity with the form rendered some relevant terminology acceptable). For example, except in its titles and marginalia, which may all postdate late antiquity, the Panegyrici Latini collection nowhere features the word panegyricus, and its earliest instance of the Latinate term laudatio occurs in Nazarius’s speech of 321, to be reprised by Pacatus Drepanius in 389 (PanLat IV[10]2.9, 6.1, 34.2; II[12]2.2; Rees 2010, p. 23). (Panegyricus was not Pliny’s name for his speech, which is first attested in the fifth century.) Was literary praise hesitant to name itself? Perhaps, but despite this cautious commitment to the terminology of praise‐giving, the very fact of a late fourth‐century collection of Latin epideictic oratory is an index of the growing acceptability of imperial panegyric in the west. Dyed‐in‐the‐wool Hellene Libanius wrote allusively but regretfully of the preference of some students of rhetoric to go to Italy to receive instruction in Latin rather than in Greek (Autobiog. 214, 234).

  But there are also some sterling examples of Greek–Latin crossovers, such as Themistius’s Greek oration to Constantius delivered in Rome in 357 (Or. 3) and the consular gratiarum actio of Claudius Mamertinus delivered to Julian in Constantinople in 362, in Latin (PanLat III[11]); the following year saw Julian himself as consul, an appointment celebrated in Antioch with three speeches, the first in Latin, followed by two in Greek (including Libanius’s Or. 12). Notable, too, is the interest in Themistius of known western notables such as Symmachus and Vettius Agorius Praetextatus (Vanderspoel 1995, pp. 24–25). Most conspicuously, perhaps, the fact that Greek‐speaking Claudian wrote imperial panegyrical hexameters in Latin leaves the aggressive disavowal by Lactantius and Isidore of literary praise‐giving as part of their own self‐definition looking like a distinctive but maverick cultural pose. Claudian shows no reticence when later recalling (in verse) his first foray into panegyric (in 395): Romanos primum bibimus te consule fontes/et Latiae cessit Graia Thalia togae (“I first drank the Roman waters when you were consul, and my Greek Muse gave way to the Latin toga” Carm. Min. 41. 13–14; Wheeler 2007; Sánchez‐Ostiz 2014 and Gualandri 2014).

  Nonetheless, the strain of anti‐Greek racism aside, the moral opprobrium that Lactantius and Isidore cast echoes down through the centuries. Augustine’s damning characterization of his own panegyrical output hinges precisely on the question of the absence of truth and reliability: pararem recitare imperatori laudes, quibus plura mentirer et mentienti faueretur ab scientibus (“I was preparing to declaim praise to the emperor, in which I would tell many lies and win favor as a liar from those who knew” Confessiones 6.6.9). Panegyric is seen to tell lies, and everybody seems to have known it. No doubt it was this that led many of the practicing historians of the day to shun its rhetoric (Ammianus Marcellinus 31.16.9; Eutropius Brev.10.18.3; Festus Brev. 30; Lucian De Hist. Conscrib. 38–41). And also, amid the untrustworthiness of imperial panegyric and the formulaic character that was the product of the political climate, the rise of ceremonial and rhetorical education, perhaps inevitably a sense of ennui often attaches to it, akin to that of the narrator of Juvenal’s first Satire (1–21). Although some texts refer fleetingly to their addressee’s reaction to the words they are hearing (e.g. PanLat X[2]4.4, VI[7]14.1, II[12]44.3, Libanius Or. 45.11), within reasonable limits, one wonders how often an emperor actually paid much attention to what was said. Even a request such as that of the orator of 310 that his sons be given opportunity within the imperial administration might hardly have caused Constantine to prick up his ears (PanLat VI[7]23.1–2). An exception in the sources is a full account of an emperor’s response to a speech detailed in Libanius’s Autobiography. Libanius records Julian’s reaction to his speech of 1 January 363:

  I spoke last, with the Emperor himself thinking that as many people as possible would gather; they said that in his care for his attendant, Hermes touched each member of the audience with his wand so that no word of mine would pass without its share of admiration. The Emperor accomplished this, first by mentioning his pleasure at my style, then by his tendency to get to his feet, then (when he could not restrain himself even when trying his hardest) he leapt from his seat, opened his cloak out fully with hands outstretched (Autobiography 129).

  Julian’s alleged enthusiasm no doubt prompts a degree of scepticism in Libanius’s readers, but given that Julian was late antiquity’s cerebral emperor, an educated, literary man and, in fact, the author of surviving panegyrics himself, it is plausible that he was both qualified and interested in the form. Even so, he was probably in the minority.

  Since late antiquity was a period in which panegyric seems to have thrived and some commentators of the time were ready in their condemnation of it, the form has easily been appropriated as evidence in academic and popular models of late antique decline. It is quite clear that Edward Gibbon is referring to panegyric – probably, in fact, the Panegyrici Latini – when he interrupts his narrative of the reign of Diocletian with observations famously critical of creative arts and says, “A languid and affected eloquence was still retained in the pa
y and service of the emperors, who encouraged not any arts except those which contributed to the gratification of their pride or the defence of their power” (Gibbon 1776–1789, chapter 13). Panegyric has regularly and easily been assimilated into a narrative of aesthetic, moral and political decline in late antiquity. Central to this is designation of panegyric as propaganda (for example, Cameron 1970, Rodríguez Gervás 1991, Whitby 1998) – part of a centralized, systematized program of political communication. This underlying assumption has shaped much of the scholarship to have addressed panegyric, although often in more or less nuanced and sophisticated ways. But in general perception, and despite the enormous range and depth of surviving material, neatly exemplified by Eusebius’s spiritual, Christian, Greek, prose Laus Constantini and Claudian’s Virgilian, pagan, Latin, hexameter panegyrics at the fourth century’s end, the material is really only beginning to experience an equivalent to the enlightened and sympathetic reception that has characterized approaches to Augustan poetry in recent decades. That particular body of literature has been rightly enshrined as canonical, despite the pressures exerted by the patronage that allowed it to come into being. That is not to say there was no difference between Augustan patronage of high literature via the offices of Maecenas and the relationships between the late imperial court and its prose and verse panegyricists. But historically scholarship has been quick to champion the literary achievement of Augustan poets and to denounce the efforts of late antique panegyric. One response to Gibbon would be to confront his model of decline with the pithy claims of two of Virgil’s greatest critics: from the fourth century, Servius’s prefatory statement of Virgil’s intention, Homerum imitari et Augustum laudare a parentibus (“to imitate Homer and praise Augustus from his forefathers”), and from the twentieth century, David West’s forthright assertion that “the Aeneid is successful panegyric” (1991).

  REFERENCES

  Ando, Clifford. (2000). Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Burgess, Theodore. (1902 [Reprint 1980]). Epideictic Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Callu, Jean‐Pierre. (2009). Symmaque: Tome 5. Discours‐Rapports. Paris: Belles Lettres.

  Cameron, Alan. (1965). Wandering poets: A literary movement in Byzantine Egypt. Historia 14, 470–509.

  Cameron, Alan. (1970). Claudian. Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Cameron, Averil and Hall, Stuart. (1999). Eusebius. Life of Constantine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Dewar, Michael. (1996). Claudian: Panegyricus de sexto consulatu Honorii Augusti. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Drake, Hal. (1976). In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and New Translation of Eusebius' Tricennial Orations. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Gibbon, Edward. (1776–1789). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London: Strahan and Cadell.

  Gibson, C.A. (2008). Libanius’s Progymnasmata: Model Exercises in Greek Prose Composition and Rhetoric. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature.

  Gillett, Andrew. (2012). Epic panegyric and political communication in the fifth‐century West. In: Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (ed. Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly), 265–290. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

  Green, Roger. (1991). The Works of Ausonius. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Gualandri, Isabella (2013 [2014]). Claudian: from Easterner to Westerner. Talanta 45: 115–130.

  Hägg, Tomas and Rousseau, Philip. ed. (2000). Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Haines, C.R. (1919–1920) Fronto. Correspondence. 2 vols. London and Cambridge MA.

  Heather, Peter and Moncur, David. (2001). Politics, Philosophy, and Empire in the Fourth Century: Select Orations of Themistius. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

  Hostein, Antony. (2012). La Cité et l’Empereur. Les Éduens dans l’Empire roman d’après les Panégyriques latins. Paris: La Sorbonne.

  Loraux, Nicole. (1986). The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  MacCormack, Sabine. (1975). Latin prose panegyrics. In: Empire and Aftermath, Silver Latin II (ed. Thomas Dorey), 143–205. London: Routledge.

  MacCormack, Sabine. (1981). Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Morton Braund, Susanna.(1998). Praise and protreptic in early imperial panegyric. In: The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity (ed. Mary Whitby), 53–76. Leiden: Brill.

  Morton Braund, Susanna. (2009). Seneca De Clementia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Nixon, Ted. (1983). Latin panegyric in the Tetrarchic and Constantinian period. In: History and Historians in Late Antiquity (ed. Brian Croke and Alanna Emmett), 88–99. Sydney: Pergamon.

  Nixon, Ted and Saylor Rodgers, Barbara. (1994). In Praise of Later Roman Emperors. The Panegyrici Latini. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Pabst, Angela. (1989). Symmachus: Reden. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

  Pernot, Laurent. (1993). La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco‐romain. Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes.

  Pernot, Laurent. (2015). Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise. Austin: University of Texas.

  Rees, Roger. (2002). Layers of Loyalty in Latin Panegyric, AD 289–307. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Rees, Roger. (2010). Words of praise in Roman politics. Millennium 7: 9–28.

  Rees, Roger. (2011). Afterwords of praise. In: Pliny’s Praise. The Panegyricus in the Roman World (ed. Paul Roche), 175–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Rees, Roger, ed. (2012a). Latin Panegyric. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Rees, Roger. (2012b). The modern history of the Panegyrici Latini. In: Latin Panegyric (ed. Roger Rees), 3–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Roche, Paul. ed. (2011). Pliny’s Praise. The Panegyricus in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Rodríguez Gervás, Manuel J. (1991). Propaganda política y opinión pública en los Panegíricos Latinos del Bajo Imperio. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.

  Russell, Donald. (1998). The panegyrists and their teachers. In: The Propaganda of Power. The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity (ed. Mary Whitby), 17–50. Leiden: Brill.

  Russell, Donald and Wilson, Nigel. (1981). Menander Rhetor: Edited with Translation and Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon.

  Sabbah, Guy. (1984). De la rhétorique à la communication politique: Les Panégyriques latins. BAGB 43: 363–88.

  Sánchez‐Osta, Alvaro (2013 [2014]). Lucretius, Cicero, Theodorus: Greek Philosophy and Latin eloquence in Claudian’s encomiastic imagination. Talanta 45: 97–114.

  Schindler, Claudia. (2009). Per carmina laudes. Untersuchungen zur spätantiken Verspanegyrik von Claudian bis Coripp. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

  Sogno, Cristiana. (2006). Q. Aurelius Symmachus: A Political Biography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

  Van Hoof, Lieve. ed. (2014). The Cambridge Companion to Libanius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Vanderspoel, John. (1995). Themistius and the Imperial Court. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

  Vanderspoel, John. (2012). A tale of two cities: Themistius on Rome and Constantinople. In: Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (ed. Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly), 223–240. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

  Ware, Catherine. (2012). Claudian and the Roman Epic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Watts, Edward. (2015). The Final Pagan Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  West, David. (1991). Virgil: The Aeneid. London. Penguin.

  Wheeler, Stephen. (2007). More Roman than the Romans of Rome. Vergilian (Self‐) Fashioning in Claudian’s Panegyric for
the Consuls Olybrius and Probinus. In: Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority, and Change (ed. David Scourfield), 97–134. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales.

  Whitby, Mary. ed. (1998). The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill.

  Wiemer, Hans‐Ulrich. (1995). Libanios und Julian. Studien zum Verhältnis von Rhetorik und Politik im vierten Jahrhundert n. Chr. Munich: C.H. Beck.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Epic Poetry

  Mary Whitby* and Michael Roberts

  14.1 Greek Epic

  Among Greek texts the very definition of epic is problematized in late antiquity by a pervasive and innovative syncretism that drew beneath the umbrella of epic forms that elsewhere existed independently, in particular those associated with rhetorical education, such as the ethopoiea (speech in character), ekphrasis (detailed and vivid description), and paraphrase, but also elements from pastoral, tragedy, and the novel. In addition, the epic hexameter is challenged by extended iambic poems, in the innovative oeuvre of Gregory of Nazianzus and later in the iambic panegyrics of George of Pisidia. It has been cogently argued (Agosti 2012, pp. 377–378) that all late antique poetry was composed for performance, whether before a private gathering or in a more public arena: hence epic and occasional poetry also merge. And major Greek poets collapse cultural boundaries, most notably Nonnus, who composed both a Hellenic Dionysiaca and a verse paraphrase of the Gospel of John; others import Orphic or Neoplatonic elements (the Argonautica and Lithica, Colluthus, John of Gaza). Several authors (Gregory of Nazianzus, Christodorus, Paul the Silentiary) composed poems in more than one genre (epic, epigram), further confronting standard distinctions. Finally, we know (through papyrus finds, entries in ancient handbooks) of much that is incomplete or lost, often other works by extant poets (Miguélez Cavero 2008; Agosti 2012) – evidence that can only be touched on here. These issues must form a backdrop to any assessment of the extant corpus. The material may be broadly classified as mythological, panegyrical or occasional, didactic, and Christian (biblical, hagiographical, religious).